rolling hills

Thankfully, the weather is at last cooperating around here.

With temperatures hovering around 10 degrees, a ride was in order.

I did not go too far - 58.99km - but really enjoyed the outing. My route took me over a series of rolling hills which I have not seen for the bicycle since sometime last October. In total, I managed 219m of elevation gain, not bad for this part of Ontario. We lack real hills around here.

I was reminded that commuting on a heavily overloaded bike is not a replacement for road riding. Yes, I have been very active this year so far - evidenced by the 1653km I have logged on the bikes after today's efforts. But that riding has been overwhelmingly slow and choppy, and has done nothing to build endurance. Today's ride, on the other hand, was a spin fest, with lots of climbing - km 5 to km 19 was mostly uphill with some minor descending - over mixed surfaces which included glass smooth pavement, broken up potholed roads, and gravel.

It was a great way to break in the new cyclocross bike - my bright orange 2013 Kona Jake the Snake.

So far, I am absolutely loving that bike. It is lighter than the old one, and much faster. The cockpit of the bike is very strange to me compared to what I am used to. The stem is shorter - all of my bikes have longer stems which were popular about a decade ago - giving me a seemingly cramped riding position. In actual fact, the slightly more compact riding position, matched to shallower road bars compared to the old bike, makes it significantly easier for me to get into the drops and produces much more assured steering than the old bike had. In part, this has to do with the very stiff (yet comfortable) carbon fiber fork vs the old bike's steel mountain bike based fork, and the tapered head tube. I point the bike where I want it to go, and it goes there with no drama, no matter how smashed up the road surface is.

The tires that come on the bike are not that great for asphalt, but are marvelous on gravel, and will be a hoot later on when things dry down a bit after the spring run off. For low pressure cyclocross knobbies, they roll along quite nicely and contribute to a fairly cushy ride on broken up surfaces. Speed is sacrificed though. I still managed a reasonable average speed for me in March. If I could afford a second wheel set, I would get one with slicks mounted for road use, and save these for trails and gravel road riding. The tires are Maxxis Mud Wrestlers.

Back to the riding though.

My legs and lungs need to be reforged as a cyclist's legs and lungs. I found myself gasping a few times when I shouldn't have, and honestly considered one hill on gravel -  an elevation jump of 33m over 310m - to have been a mistake being as it was near to the end of the ride.

And yet, I felt refreshed. It was wonderful.

I estimate that in another four or five rides, things should be back to normal and start to look up for the rest of the season.

Where is that pesky hammer and anvil...

first time fast

First time out on one of the faster bikes this year. Not the new Orange One, but rather my eight year old Jake the Snake, with 700 x 23c slicks and fenders.

Oh the gift of wings.

It was so much faster than what I have been lumbering around on for the last several months!!

Now I just need to get out and ride and ride some more.

Soon, there will be no salt left on the roads, and day time temperatures at more reasonable levels which will allow me to get on the new bike, strip off several layers, and really get moving.

Anticipation.

a busy few days

It has been a busy few days.

On the surface, not much has been going on. I have gotten up, gone to work, returned home, worked some more, and slept. Rinse, lather, repeat all week long.

But a few things came to an end this week, ushering in as they did some new beginnings. Firstly, the Friday I have been waiting for finally arrived.

the new bike leaning against one of my daughter's many book cases

I was finally able, after long last and much saving, to pick up my 2013 Kona Jake the Snake cyclocross bike. This thing looks to be a beauty, and I am really very much looking forward to riding it. Lots of pictures of it and a mini review will come later when I can get to it. It is still very salty outside - left overs from winter - and I refuse to ride it outdoors until the salt is washed away.

The pick up of the new wheels happened on Friday.

Saturday, I had a pile of errands to run, a birthday party for my nephew to go to, a birthday party to drop my daughter off at for her friend, and a visit with a friend of mine. We went out walking for a bit around Uptown Waterloo and I shot a couple of pictures.

sign outside a local restaurant

inside a local bike shop

Besides a very good coffee and some light refreshment, one of the things that was accomplished was that my friend picked up his new bike.

There is a lot of that going around it would seem.

He needed a new commuter, and settled on a pretty sweet basic Brodie to help him cart his carcass around the city. Nice bike. Good colour. And a very happy friend. I don't have a picture of it yet, but that is, I assure you, coming. You see, this friend of mine wants to do more biking, and wants to use the new wheels as a car and we can both foresee our collective families getting together for many rail trail rides this spring and summer. Should be good fun.

Today? Busy as well. More work, a bit of play, and some furniture moving.

I almost look forward to getting back to work tomorrow so things can settle down a bit.

say what cloud?

Had an interesting talk with my father today about cloud based processing and "the cloud" in general. He is a retired computer person, who was working in the industry back in the 1960s through to the early 2000s.

Goes something like this.

Before, we had computers that were stand alone devices. I might have one, you might have one. We all, perhaps, might have had one.

Then, we started to build networks which could link one computer to another computer within a building. Files could be shared, etc etc.

Diagramming the connections between different computers was easy. A symbol could be used to represent each computer, and another for a router, and lines could be drawn to illustrate the connections between them.

Enter the Internet in its infancy as it became more than a research project.  Now the network diagrams became more difficult to draw. The local ones would be relatively unchanged. Mapping out how things moved from a local network to the Internet hub was easy as well, but beyond that? Tricky. Mapping data leaving the net was easy as well. But in between? Tricky.

So, on the whiteboard would appear the following. A map of the local network, a map of the end result, and a single word. That word is network. And it was surrounded by a "thought bubble" that was cloud shaped.

That's it. That is the cloud. Nothing new here.

When you use cloud based storage or software, you are essentially trusting that another company has your best interests at heart. That they won't do anything with your stuff. That they will even exist when you need them. You better encrypt it before you store it, or it is open for viewing.

Ironically, your fancy pants computer has become effectively an expensive terminal using someone else's big computer (or network farm). Just like in the old mainframe days of the 1980s.

today was about a trip

Took a short tour over to Grand Bend to see the swans this morning. 

Tundra Swans in Grand Bend

Tundra Swans in Grand Bend

Tundra Swans in Grand Bend

There were literally thousands of them in the fields resting on the ice. It was, though, bitterly cold outside with a strong west wind blowing off of Lake Huron. No snow, but very cold.

After that, it was lunch at the local Timmies, and off to Bayfield for some more pictures in the cold.

Picture in the Cold in Bayfield

Picture in the Cold in Bayfield

Picture in the Cold in Bayfield

Then we went home.

garmin edge 200 review

Again, the usual qualifiers: I am not a product reviewer, but rather a user of products; I am not being paid by Garmin or anyone else to review this product; I paid for it myself with my own money; etc, etc, etc.

What in the world prompted me to buy this you might ask?!?

Ok. I am the first the admit it. I am a geek.

I like numbers and have been, for well over a year now, anally recording every single km ridden on my bikes in a spreadsheet and have been content doing so. With my new bike on order (due to hit the road late April) and being faced with the prospect of buying yet another cycling computer to track the numbers for that bike, I did a bit of digging into some non-traditional approaches as to what to use to track my km and other data.

Benefits of a GPS system (for me)

There is no set up. Simply attach the unit to the bike, stick it in your pocket, what ever you want, and go. If you swap tyres around like I tend to do, there is no (relatively) tedious set up like there is with conventional magnetic ticker counter bike computers.

Data is therefore consistent between different bicycles and tyre sizes. Any error in the reading of the speed and distance will at least be a constant error regardless of any variation in the bicycles or tyres used.

Disadvantages of a GPS system (for me)

Battery life is not what I am used to. Usually, I get several years out of a battery on my bike computer but the GPS systems need more charging. All this means is that I have to remember to do it. But, since I am disciplined to charge my cell phone and tablet every night, what is another device? No big deal. Just remember to do it is all or that next ride might be dataless. Something which only matters if you care, which you do or why bother with a GPS device?

Errors. Yep, there are errors with a GPS system. Venture into a tunnel? Bye Bye signal. Trees? Can do it too apparently. As long as this is not a huge deal, it is, well, not a huge deal. Depends on the person and what they are using the data for.

How I am using the device / Mounting the device

My intention is to use this device as my speedometer for all of my bikes except the off road bike. That bike spends a lot to most of its time under heavy forest cover and is also voted most likely to crash and crash hard. This means that mounting a GPS unit to it is not something I am interested in doing.

Garmin is nice in that they ship the device with two mounts, and enough thick stretchy elastics to choke a goat so an owner of this GPS can immediately set up two bicycles with the unit without having to move the mounts around. Extra bits can be ordered if so desired. Also, the elastics are long enough, and varied enough, that they can accommodate stem or handlebar mounting. This is a nice touch and something that Garmin should be praised for.

Garmin, Sram, and a few other companies also make mounts to put the device (all of the "edge" GPS units from Garmin use the same mounting system - set it in the mount sideways, twist, click, and it is mounted) out in front of the handle bar stem without using much handlebar real estate. Ever see those speedometers riders in the Tour de France use sticking low and out front of the stem? These brackets will mount the device like that. I am going for the Sram bracket as the Garmin one is crazy expensive ($65 here in CDN dollars vs $25 for the Sram) for what amounts to basically the same thing.

At the end of the day, this GPS will replace several different bike computers. No more magnets, cords, zip ties. All gone. The bikes will look a lot cleaner and will be easier to wash up when they get filthy.

In use

When the device is first turned on, the screen is broken into four sections. Clockwise from the upper left, they read as follows:

1. Courses - a list of preset (by you) courses that you can follow. This is not a feature that I have explored and wonder, now, if it is something I will use. Time will tell if I will use it. If I do, I will report back and say what I think. For now? No comment.
2. Ride - press this when you want to go on a ride. It will geolocate you via satellites, and you are off.
3. Settings - does what you think it does. You can set how you want distance counted, your weight, height, etc etc. Useful if you want the calorie counter to be as close as possible.
4. History - this allows you to browse previous rides stored on the device. 

Each section has a little arrow pointing to the button on the side nearest to it and each function is selected by the button. The screen is not a touch screen.

Press the ride button, and the device attempts to find your location. You now have two options, "back" and "start". Press start and the device starts to track what you are doing.

Once a ride is "started", the screen reads like this from top to bottom:

1. Current speed. This is in a smallish font compared to what I am used to. Even the smaller speedometers I have use bigger numbers for the speedometer than this Garmin unit does. That said, I no longer notice now that I am used to seeing it. Next to the current speed, on the left of the numbers, is the little +/- symbol to tell you if you are over or above the current average speed.
2.  Distance. The font is the same size as the Current Speed function.
3. Time. This is the elapsed time since the ride was started. If the auto pause feature is selected from the settings menu, the timer will pause when no motion is detected. The lowest of the four lines of text on the device will display how long you were paused for. The device will sound an alert if no motion is detected, and again when motion resumes.
4. The last data item is variable. It has Average Speed (default), Ascent (done by GPS tracking not barometric pressure so it is not so accurate - more on that later), Calories (a guess since this device does not support heart rate monitors or any other external add ons), 

Once a ride is done, pressing the upper right button takes you to some options. Again, upper left in clockwise rotation they are as follows:

1. Back to start -  an rtfm moment for me - not a function I have used.
2. Resume - restarts the ride again. This is a nice feature. When riding to work, I pause the ride, work all day, and restart it for the trip home. I end up with three "times" this way - moving time, elapsed riding time, and total time since the ride was first started. I can see when I left the house and when I got home that way. Depending on how long the day was, this can be a depressingly large number (heh).
3. Save - stores the ride in the device's history.
4. Discard - dumps the ride from the memory.

The first ride out, the device seemed to be confused a bit in its display of speed. My speed was constant, but the unit reported wildly - over 5kmph - different speeds. I was under a very light tree cover. The unit has not done that again, either at the same spot or even under broad highway overpasses. I am marking this down as a hiccup and am not going to worry about it.

A couple of things I like about the device have to do with how rugged it is. For one, it is rated for operation down to -20 Celsius. That is very handy for someone who commutes all winter in our moderate Southern Ontario winters. Should I need to use it ever when it is really cold, under the jacket it will go in an inside pocket. It should still work there as my cell phone GPSs have done when under coats in the winter.  The device is also rated quite highly for waterproofing. It has a IPX7 rating which translates to 30 minutes under water up to 1m deep. Good enough for rain and snow... and nice when coming inside from the cold.

The best is saved for last

And here it is: http://connect.garmin.com/ 

When you buy a Garmin device like this, you get a free account on Garmin Connect. With this, you can post routes in your area for the public to see, compare stats with your friends using Garmin devices, form groups to track data (clubs etc).

I use it to track my stats. Check the site out - there are sample screen shots of the various features there for you to look at.

One nice thing about it is this. Remember I said that the Edge 200 uses the GPS satellites to track elevation? Garmin Connect auto corrects any errors based on the breadcrumb trail the device passes over to the site. Their maps have accurate elevations, and their software fixes any errors in this regard so that the profiles it draws are accurate.

Final word for now

Would I recommend this product? Yes.

some mornings it is worth getting up

My snowy icy ride into work looked like this; it was worth getting up for.