qkslvrwolf.com » navel-gazing

Bike Commuting

qkslvrwolf — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 02:26:15 +0000

So, for the first time in about 2 months, I commuted to work by bike today. It’s always more challenging than it should be for me to convince myself to get on the bike in the morning, especially considering that I usually enjoy most of my ride. My goal for this summer was to consistently commute via bike 3 times a week, and thus far I’ve been failing miserably. TDY’s haven’t helped, but that’s an excuse. The ride today was mostly enjoyable, but my ass hurts. Plan is to do it tomorrow, weather pending. I was also supposed to buy myself some rain-gear tonight so I could stop using possible rain as an excuse.

What’s interesting, though, is the speed I rode at today. After 2 months away from biking and generally not being all that active, I not only broke my time and speed records in both directions, but I broke my outbound by 10%, which I feel significant. My previous best had been a about 52 minutes, and today I rode it in 47. My average speed beat my old average speed by almost 2 miles an hour.

My ride back wasn’t so impressive, and although I beat my previous best by about 2 minutes, I think it was likely because of extreme luck in stoplights. I barely hit any.

I have noticed a theme with physical activity for myself. Any time I take about 1-2 months off of doing something, I usually get a small window of really high performance right when I start doing it again. This has been true of most of the stuff that I’ve tracked; fencing, lifting, and now biking. Running seems to be the exception, but I feel like my biggest foe running is mental: not exhaustion, but boredom. I get really bored running, and it takes me awhile of doing it to find the zen ability to let my mind drift and THINK about things to keep myself from getting so bored running that I stop.

I find when I am doing any long-time-frame (anything over about 20 minutes) solo physical activity, the only way that I can continue to do it is to find some kind of balance between pain and boredom. Pain I can deal with, boredom I can deal with, but apparently I can’t or won’t deal with being bored and in pain. (I’m good at differentiating between healthy working pain and you’re injuring yourself pain, so to protective friends and family: I am not, and never will, hurt myself or try and “tough it out” through injurious pain.) If I’m gasping for breath, and my legs are getting tired, and I’m bored, not only will I likely quit, I likely won’t come back to it.

This is one definite reason I’ve always been better at team sports. One of the things I’ve noticed on my bike commute is that when I get passed, I can outperform my normal best easily and without much mental sacrifice just staying close on the tail of whoever passed me. Competing, even at the same thing that bores me without just a hint of competition, keeps me entertained.

It’s all very odd.

Sigh

qkslvrwolf — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 03:33:31 +0000

I’m kinda half-wondering if I’ve been owned again. There’s some weird shit in my logs. But. If I’ve been owned they’re being much sneakier about it this time…there’s nothing on my pages, nothing hidden in the html…so I guess I”ll just have to keep an eye on it. I will tell you, it makes me nervous when people are hitting my website by searching on a theme, given that that’s the vector I got hit with last time.

Just a few comments about things

qkslvrwolf — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 22:52:21 +0000

So, nothing really to report. Helped Jessica move, which was about the easiest move ever…she doesn’t have very much stuff, so there wasn’t a lot to carry. It was fun though. She also took me for a swim in one of the ponds around her house, which was AWESOME. Crystal clear water, sandy bottom. The way swimming should always be.

Also, I set up her wireless internet. She had a cisco/linksys E1000. I gotta say, I have never used their installation programs in the past, but this time, it was worth it. It was secure by default, and it didn’t install any crap-ware or set itself up to reside in memory on her box. It set up her home network with a random SID, a randomly generated strong password and WPA key, and even set up a guest network that is unencrypted, but requires a password to log in to. It was awesome. I may have to see if the trendnet that I bought for our house has anything similar, because It Just Worked, AND it was secure. I don’t know how the router is going to work out, but kudos to cisco for the setup.

When I got home today, and started to work on chores and errands, I talked to Regina about my plans for the bed loft. She suggested that I just go with a custom closet organization, and I have to say, it should work, and be easier to get set up then doing the loft, if not as cool. So I guess I need to go to that organization store, whatever it’s called, with measurements for my closet so I can start moving into my new room.

NOT doing the bed loft gives me some time to work on my other organizational project: digitizing my files, encrypting them, syncing them to the cloud, and reducing my filing cabinet from 4 drawers down to 2, so I can fit it in my room. That’s what I’m starting on tonight: finding out if I can happily encrypt and sync to a cloud storage.

Finally, I put up some pictures from the trip to St. Louis.

[Show as slideshow]

[View with PicLens]

New theme

qkslvrwolf — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 10:54:27 +0000

So, I changed my wordpress theme again because I was getting attacks coming in targeting the vigilance theme. While I don’t think that any of them were successful, after parroting them from my own browser, there’s probably some piece of that puzzle that I’m missing as I have zero black hat skillz.

I don’t think I like the new theme nearly as much, but, hey, let me know what you think…I usually hit the backend of my site more anyway.

Also, for any of you out there using wordpress, automatic updates don’t apply to themes, apparently. So you’ll probably want to go into your theme as often as possible and keep it updated.