One bike is good but if I could have three, one would be a steel bike from Sacha White of Vanilla Bicycles, their alter ego of Speedvagen, or a Dario Pegoretti bike from Italy. (The second one would be a titanium bike from Moots and the third one would be a Parlee carbon fiber bike…ok, fine, and a fourth Parlee triathlon bike).
The bikes from these two guys are well built and just pretty — construction, paint job, geometry. Steel isn’t the lightest frame material but can be made pretty light and supposedly the ride is fast, responsive, and fantastic. Steel is also supposed to be pretty durable and easy to repair.
Oh, well.
I’ve been experimenting with different communication tools lately: Facebook, Twitter, text, Google Voice, Skype, email, etc, and blog posts have been few and far between – mostly due to writer’s block, a bit of posting and un-posting, and uncertainty as to who’s actually reading what I write.
It’s obvious the majority of my friends aren’t reading my blog posts but I can probably do a better job of linking Facebook and Twitter to this blog.
Anyhow, short update:
- We’re on version 3.1.4 for Thunderbird, working on Thunderbird 3.2 due out later this year;
- Working through updating Mozilla Messaging to coincide with mozilla.org/.com updates;
- Wrapped up Ironman Canada in August (and Ironman St George last May), signed up for Ironman St George for next year;
- Starting up trail running and doing a lot of it in the East Bay hills, which is neat, this is in place of road running which is super high impact;
- Might be re-upping to be an Executive Board Member for Alameda Council, BSA;
- Doing some more Boy Scout related stuff this year mainly driving and camp outs (local program is good, National politics not so good);
- We have a 10 year wedding anniversary trip in November to Turks and Caicos;
- Starting to plan for snowboarding outings, hopefully will be another good snow year;
- and then we’re in 2011. That was quick.
I’ll post some race reports and photos soon from Canada, and a few things I’ve stumbled upon and like. Turns out at the age of 34 and male and married, I’m in the very desirable target market for a lot of companies and I’m obviously observant of the advertising being thrown at me/us. Some of the marketing does make it through unfortunately.
The other next up is figuring out how to integrate blog, Twitter, Facebook, email a little better. It’s not as cohesive as I’d like.
I ran the Oakland 1/2 Marathon yesterday, the inaugural Oakland running festival which had other running events like a relay, 5k, and of course the full marathon.
I had a lot of fun, the course is super fast and flat, folks were great/happy/excited, the running shirt was nice. The support was awesome, no shortage of volunteers and spectators. I was surprised by the number of people that were out and about cheering (moreso than the San Francisco marathon).
Ran into a few folks Derrick and Dr. Bean from IronTeam. Ben was at the finish line volunteering.
More thoughts from other folks
The other day, I encountered eight (eight!) people who had come to town just for the marathon. All of them made a point of saying how surprised they were to discover what a beautiful city Oakland is. It was totally heartwarming.
A friend of mine was telling me that the prettiest money she ever saw was the Dutch guilder. I had to look it up and I now have to agree. Wouldn’t be a bad collection to framed up on a wall somewhere.
Top of lift six, Cornice Express at Kirkwood.
What a great snow year in Tahoe! We’ve been up a few times, wished we could have gone up more. We’ve really only gone to Kirkwood which gets a ton of snow early in the season and it got dumped on this year, so we just kept going there.
Here, I’m all Burton-ed out. Jacket is from the Shaun White collection. Shirt is a snowboarding shirt from Burton too. Snowboard pants are denim (goretex but it does still get cold and wet so good for warm days…but they do look cool). Boots are Burton Hail. The helmet is Giro, the bindings are Flow, the sunglasses are Oakley, the cap is from Rapha.
I’m more than happy to model Burton’s 2011 collection next year…Call me :-)
[Apologies for the lack of writing, going back to writing now, hopefully a post a week if not more].
Great job! Lot of great changes to help move the web forward.
Check out http://hacks.mozilla.org to test drive our new toy.
Palm Pre looks pretty good, probably will wait for the next version though. Even with the iPhone 3GS, it’s probably the right upgrade path from a Treo. A lower price/plan, better battery life would have knocked the Palm Pre out of the ballpark, but still good. Walt Mossberg’s review
Other stuff I’ve been playing around with:
- an unlocked G1 phone (w/ Android 1.5, fun to play with)
- mobile wireless via Sprint (though heard AT&T’s was 3x faster)
I check out the Netbooks every once in a while and I like the Dell Minis but there’s so many out there now. It’s an interesting (and confusing) product segmentation — second laptop, ultralight for business travelers, kids.
At some point got caught up with finding nice bed linens. Eventually settled on the following:
- Thomas Lee sheet and pillow set — a flat sheet, fitted sheet, and two pillow cases. They’re 500 thread count cotton sheets which seems fine to me, neither arbitrarily too high or too low. In any case, sheets are comfortable and reasonably priced.
- Libeco Belgian linens — have a couple pillow cases and I like their linen sheets
- Rough Linen — haven’t gotten anything from here but local company and I like the simplicity of their products
- Pacific Coast pillows and comforters — very comfortable, got the firm and ‘luxury’ down pillow
If you’re going to spend 6 – 8 hours a night on your bed, might as well make it comfortable. We’re still sleeping on a $200 Serta mattress from 1999, it’s still very comfortable — so it’s not all about getting the most expensive, just what’s comfortable.
Some good ideas for a vegetable garden (especially for people with a new empty backyard).
Square Foot Garding from Frugal Dad
