Happy Memorial Day!

Hello. My name is Eric, and I'm a Zumaholic.

Hard to believe it is Memorial Day weekend already. Where is the year going? It seems like only yesterday it was snowing. I'm looking forward to the long weekend. Planning on spending some time with family and generally practicing at being a slacker. Probably will go see some movies too. I especially want to see The Day After Tomorrow. Nothing like a cheery disaster movie to lift the spirits! Hopefully I will get a chance to get caught up some reading. More than likely I will be flying my chopper in some combat missions in the jungles of Vietnam. If the weather is nice, I also plan on spending some quality time with my bike on the Silver Comet.

I hope you all have a great holiday. And while we're all relaxing and having a good time, let's not forget what Memorial day is really all about.

Weekend Update

So yesterday we went to see Shrek 2. It was great! In fact I think I enjoyed it even more than the first one. I learned a whole lot about the Fairy Godmother that I never knew before.

Today I hit the Silver Comet trail for another bike ride. Went around 32 miles. Knees didn't give me any trouble at all, I'm happy to report. The weather was beautiful. It was a little on the warm side but lots of stretches on the trail are shaded with trees which provide a lot of shade. I met a nice couple at the rest stop at mile marker 15.75, who were also out enjoying the weather and riding their bikes. So, today was a lot of fun and I'm still floating on those endorphins.

Earlier this week I received a letter at my office from Senator John Kerry. I'm not sure that he personally mailed it or anything, but it had his signature. Apparently his campaign is under the impression that I'm a Bush-hating John Kerry supporter, and that I'd probably like to pony up some cash. Any of you reading this who actually know me very well at all will know just how funny I thought that was.

The thing that struck me most about the letter was the negativity. It was all about getting Bush out of office, how evil the Republicans are, etc. It was two pages long and I didn't see any details about what Senator Kerry was planning on actually doing better. Needless to say I won't be writing a check anytime soon.

Thought for the day:

Shake it like a Polaroid picture. - OutKast

Quick Tour update

My knee is fine now. :) The ice did the trick. I'm planning on taking a nice long, leisurely ride on the Silver Comet this weekend.

Also, I just found out last night that they had a professional photographer on the route, and there is one picture posted with me in it, taken a few minutes before the blowout if memory serves correctly. :)

Weekend Update

Been awhile since I posted to the blog, so here are some updates. First, today was the Tour de Cure. Thank you so much to everyone who sponsored me! Thanks to all your support, I managed to reach my goal of raising $500 in donations to the American Diabetes Association. I can't tell you how much it means to me. I really appreciate everyone's generosity!

I must say, the weather was absolutely perfect for the Tour. It was in the 70s, maybe low 80s, and slight overcast, so the sun wasn't beating down on us too badly. There was just a slight breeze. You really couldn't ask for better conditions. However, today's Tour still presented several challenging moments. I started off strong, but about 20 minutes or so into the ride I started experiencing a very sharp pain in my right knee. I'm not quite sure what caused it -- I've never had that kind of knee pain before. I think it may be because I was running late and didn't have time to warm up before the ride, and I started off at a pretty brisk pace. I was really worried I was going to have to drop out very early in the ride. I shifted into a lower gear for a few minutes and the pain went away. Needless to say, I was relieved.

I made it to the first rest stop feeling pretty good. They had some Powerade and some light snacks. I stopped for about 10 minutes and got right back on the road. The next stretch was fairly uneventful, except for a couple of "character building" hills. I managed to conquer them without too much difficulty. By the time I got to the second rest stop (about 20 miles in) I was starting to feel it a little more. Donna volunteered at that rest stop today, so I spent some time chatting with her, drank some more Powerade and water, and had a few of this little cookies they had. They also had a mechanic there from Cycleworks, and since he was there, I asked him to look at my derailleur because it had slipped a couple of times and seemed to need a bit of adjustment. While he was at it, I asked him to check the tire pressure. This may have been a mistake ... he said they were a little under 80 psi, the sidewalls said to inflate to a max of 100 psi, so he added some air. When I left the rest stop the bike seemed to be riding quite a bit better.

Whatever twisted individual designed this route saved most of the hills for the final stretch. OK, it may have just seemed that way because I was starting to get pretty fatigued. My right knee pain came back on one of the hills. Once again, after shifting down to a lower gear and spinning for awhile, the pain went away.

Finally, about three miles away from the finish, as I started up another hill, I felt the bike shaking quite a bit as I started pedaling. Then I noticed the back end seemed a little wobbly. I looked down and discovered that I had a flat tire. I pulled over to the side of the road and was suddenly very glad that the day before, I had bought a spare tube as well as a little toolkit. My relief at being prepared disappeared, however, once I had the wheel and tire off, I discovered that the stupid tube had a Shrader valve instead of a Presta valve, which is what I needed. The Shrader valve simply would not fit through my rim. I had a patch kit, but I could not find a puncture or locate the leak on the old tube. It would hold air and wouldn't go completely flat, but it would not hold much pressure, so I think perhaps that the problem was the valve or valve stem. I wondered if the tube had more pressure than it could handle, after the bike guy topped it off. Regardless, at that point I was stuck dead in the water, SOOOOO close to the finish. I was very disappointed. They had several folks driving "sag wagons", so I wasn't really stranded. I had turned down a couple of offers for assistance already when I was taking off the wheel, etc. After making my discovery, however, I accepted the offer of the next one that came by and rode the last few miles in a nice Mercedes SUV. I have to say, nice as that Mercedes was, that was NOT how I wanted to finish the ride. It is hard to express how disappointed I was to come so close to not be able to make those last few miles. And all because I bought the wrong stupid tube at the bike store. Of course, the first time I have ever actually gotten a flat tire on a ride would have to be today. Well, you live and learn I guess.

After getting back to the park where the race started I got my T-Shirt and lunch. The downside to Donna volunteering was that I then had to sit and wait for an hour and a half for her to get back. Meanwhile, off the bike the pain in my right knee came back with a vengeance, and it hasn't let go since. It mostly hurts when I bend the knee, especially when I put weight on it. I'm icing it down and hoping it feels better tomorrow. Fortunately I had already planned on taking tomorrow off, so I should be able to give it a rest, and maybe go see the doc if it doesn't start getting better.

In other news ... in my previous entry I wrote about being happily releived about not having to get our water heater repaired. Well, as luck would have it, a week later we ended up having to get it replaced to the tune of about $920. We ended up not going with the plumbing company I had been so pleased with -- their estimate came in at $1200 for a non-specific brand name/warranty water heater. (If it seems pricey, it is, but partly because it's a pretty large water heater -- 80 gallons). We had looked at Home Depot and their price was about $800 installed, for the top of the line GE with a 12 year warranty, 3 years in home. I was a bit irritated that once I was at home waiting for them to arrive and install it, I got two calls from them. First they called to say it was going to be an extra $45, because the expansion tank needed for the 80 gallon heater was not included in the original quote. Of course, the existing heater did not have an expansion tank, but apparently the tank is now required by "code". Later, call #2 came saying that since the tank was so large and heavy, a second technician was needed, for an additional charge of $75. I expressed my annoyance that these things should have been quoted in the original price, since while they were coming as a surprise to me they shouldn't have been any surprise to them. The lady on the phone said she'd "see what she could do" about it, and of course I never heard from her again. I consoled myself with the fact that it was still cheaper in the end than the other place.

That was painful. But hot water is good, especially after you've just finished riding (nearly) 30 miles.

Well, off to ice the knee some more. Thanks again to every one for all their support this year. Oh, and before I forget, GO JUNIOR!!!!

At last, I know why I hate pair programming ...

If you're a programmer, I'm sure you've heard of XP (eXtreme Programming -- not the OS). I've always felt that certain aspects of XP were very useful (unit testing and iterative development, for example) but have been uncomfortable with it as a whole. The lack of any kind of upfront design always bothered me. I also always hated pair programming. At long last, I know why. I found an article on XP in the September, 2003 issue of Wired which finally clears it up for me:

Mostly, though, what changed Kevin Yu is pair programming. In a profession known for its lone wolves and silent cubes, in a culture routinely mocked for its social ineptitudes, putting coders up close to each other seems counterintuitive, even risky. Recent research into autism suggests that some software engineers may actually suffer from a genetic disorder that impedes their ability to interact.

What a relief to know that not subscribing to the practice of pair programming merely indicates a genetic defect! (BTW, I stumbled across this article referenced from an excellent article in the May 2004 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal, titled "The Irony of Extreme Programming". (These authors also wrote a book which I think I may need to add to my collection called XP Refactored: The Case Against Extreme Programming. That explanation from the Wired article is just the type of thing that has always bothered me about the XP zealots. If you don't agree with every single practice, or think that the totality of the XP approach is appropriate for every situation, the problem isn't XP - it's you. You either don't care enough to do the "right thing", you are too stupid to understand it, or something else is wrong with you (perhaps a genetic defect?).

Well, enough of that little rant. One bad thing that turned into a good thing this week, our electric water heater stopped working. Donna woke me up one morning to let me know that she had just finished her shower and the water was just "warm". Of course, all that was left for me was ice cubes strained through the showerhead. I checked the circuit breaker, hopeful, but no luck. Then I turned to my usual friend in times of crisis -- Google. I learned that water heaters generally have a secondary cut off switch that you can reset. Well I searched high and low and couldn't find one, so I figured our water heater must be, as luck would have it, one that didn't not have such a switch. Since I hate the telephone (probably something to due with the genetic defect I mentioned above) I had Donna start calling plumbers. She called AAA Allied Plumbing and I ended up getting on the phone with the guy at the other end. He told me that it was most likely the cut off switch on the heater itself. I told him I couldn't find one. He described where it would be. Turned out that there was a metal panel that had to be removed, after taking some screws out, then behind some insulation -- TADA! -- there was the reset button. I pushed it and all was well. I'm so used to being screwed over by repair people of various types that it was very refreshing that he cheerfully told me what to do over the phone instead of taking advantage of my ignorance and being able to charge for a service call. But on the other hand it was probably shrewd -- next time I have need of a plumber you can bet they will be the first people I call. The downside to all of that is, according to what I read online, those little cutoff circuits don't just trip for no reason. It usually indicates a problem with the unit. And if you have to reset it once, you'll probably have to keep resetting it, and at some point repair or replace the unit. So far so good ... we'll see!

Well, the weekend's a wasting so I'm outta here. Off to see a movie and run some errands. Not sure what we're gonna watch yet but I'll be sure and post my review later. :)