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I just wanted to thank everyone who supported me on the ride. It still feels like a dream... if everything works out, hopefully I'll be on the road again next year!
If you're wondering what the ride and the people were like, the AIDS/Lifecycle folks put together a blog and daily videos. The people who captured and edited this series of videos captured the essence of the ride.
Blog: http://aidslifecycle.typepad.com
ALC7 Videos on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/aidslifecycle7
Sorry - I've neglected to update my Vox blog on the AIDS/Lifecycle ride. I've been pretty busy since I got back... like really crazy busy. I'll post a day-by-day account soon!
I'm pretty impressed that Steve Ballmer kept it cool after being egged buy some protestor in Hungary not too long ago...
Me, my sister and my cousin didn't make the full 100 miles. The heat was too much for us to take. Me and my sister called it quits at 43 miles. My cousin made it to 49 miles (or maybe it was 55).
Too bad the weather was nowhere as cooperative as it is this weekend.
... that it's much cooler than it was earlier.
Me, my sister and my cousin have all agreed that we're not willing to risk our health to complete 100 miles... let alone 50 miles. It will be a wait-and-see as we go along...
It's going to be HOT.... HOT HOT HOT. I just looked it up on Yahoo! Weather... this is what it says...
Saturday... 100 degrees as a high... I'm hoping it will be cooler...
Yes... still training for AIDS/Lifecycle 7, which is less that 3 weeks away now! (Hint... hint... it's not too late to make a donation... http://www.aidslifecycle.org/1545)
I left too late on Saturday to make it down to Mission San Juan Bautista from my home in San Jose. I only made it to Gilroy because I needed to buy a Mother's Day present. I have to admit, that was a nice ride down Monterey Road. The most difficult part was getting to Monterey Road down Tully Road from the foothills east of San Jose. Went down Tully, dodged cars trying to get on and off 101, but had quite a few cyclist-sympathetic drivers (thanks!) who made it easy for me to cross.
After mapping things out, riding to San Juan Bautista would have been about 55 miles. I'll do that another day...
I went down Tully, to Old Tully by the SC Fairgrounds and on to Monterey Road. From there, it's a breeze, albeit a bit grimy of a ride with dust and particulates strewn by cars as they flew by. Interestingly enough, the "15 Mile Spot" is 15 miles from my house (according to my GPS and bike computer). Overall, I'd have to say Monterey Road is VERY bike friendly down to Gilroy! There are a few rough patches in South San Jose and through San Martin, but overall, not bad.
Once I got onto good road, I was able to sustain 21 mph for a couple of miles. It suprised the cr*p out of me. Low rolling resistance, 120psi in the tires and a little bit of a grade in my favor are possible factors contributing to this:) I'm not complaining.
Once down there, got a bling purse for my wife at Michael Korrs and hit Pearl Izumi where I got new cycling shorts (mtn bike style, not into the crotch revealing road shorts and some socks).
I think I found my regular weekend ride!
I'm a Mac-head - people who know me already know that. Despite all the negative things I hear about Vista, I've been using it regularly for almost a week now and it's extremely stable. My daughter has been running Vista on her laptop since last summer without a hitch...
So I'm not quite sure what all the mumbling has been about. Personally, after the initial "cool" factor, I feel like I'm using XP with a hacked interface. There really isn't that much of a difference between the two.
However, Office 2007 is a huge improvement over Office 2003! It's a much more pleasant application environment to be in. That's something that I think has been missing in Microsoft apps since the global acceptance of Windows 3.1... and that's only because Win 3.1 was a much more pleasant environment than DOS.... :)
So I realized that I can't quite live without a Windows PC. Go figure. My tower got zapped when the power went out a few weeks ago. When the power went back on, I tried to power up and the tower simply would not boot. The power supply appeared to be okay, but I'm guessing that the BIOS got fried. The error I get is some BIOS checksum error. Even manually clearing the the CMOS did nothing. Bummer.
I was originally going to get another tower to replace the zapped one, but figured a laptop might be more convenient. Along with various software that I used regularly on my XP box, there's a handful of GPS apps that I couldn't take along with me to run on my Macbook Pro (yeah, I could have gotten virtualization software, but with 80 gigs of HD space, that doesn't leave a whole lot of space for data once the apps are isntalled).
So I got a Compaq Presario F755 - I got it at an excellent price, and was just a tiny bit more than the tower I was looking at. Convenience over power won. Anyways, this thing has a 160gig harddrive with 2 gigs of RAM. Far better specs than any other laptops I looked at within the price range (less than $550). I refuse to purchase a high end PC anymore... they're such commodities these days that commanding a high price doesn't seem to make sense. Anyways, I noticed that the prices of notebooks have gone up over the past year. I'm guessing it's due to the same reasons there's an increase in consumer goods.
He's apparently moving to EMI as a president of some sort to figure out future business models.
It's funny considering he graced the cover of March's Fast Company...
