Author: sunnywiz

Me.

Trying to come to peace with my inner butterfly

I went to CodeMash earlier in the year, and I came away with a desire to do some Machine Learning stuff in my spare time.  I needed a Plan, I said.  I’d get up at 5am I said, and have time in the morning!  

So I made this system for myself, using AirTable, something my wife had found:

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To further decrease friction, I broke each project into steps:

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See that 4th column?  I’m calling that my “Affirmations” column.  Its like listing a fear, but then converting it into an affirmation instead. 

I even created a view that filtered things down to just things that were actionable at the moment:

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This worked well for about 3 days, and then … I no longer woke up at 5am.  Instead, I woke up at 5, then at 6, then at 7am, with just enough time to get to work.  And  when the day is done with me.. and we’ve cooked and cleaned and the day is winding down.. its 10pm, and its time to go to bed, if I want to wake up at 5am.

But, I don’t go to bed at 10pm either.  Right now, its 10:30pm.  I should be writing this post in the morning.  But I know, at 5am, my morning-self … just doesn’t care.  F-U he says to my evening self.  And its COLD outside the covers, and the damned dog is sleeping on my sweatshirt.

No happy ending yet.  But I also know I need to get back to running, because the progression of miles is coming up soon.   So… yeah. Smile  Some decisions get to be made.

CodeMash 2018

imageWinding down from two days of fun.. putting thoughts in one spot so I can find them later.    In general, to those who are not me (and are developer-types) I’d say:  Codemash is a GREAT conference, you should attend it at least once if nothing else just to see how they run things and optimize things.

How have conference contents changed?

The following is compared to my previous experiences at CodePaLousa and CodeStock – I’m thinking this is “industry and conference changes” more than “different conferences with different focuses”.

Themes that stood out  

Blockchain and Machine Learning were big.     As was Devops, as in the definition “developers doing ops straight to production” / seamless deployments / putting all the things in the pipeline.    

Blockchain was focused more on the math, the intro to the science, and one talk was about .. well, i didn’t go to it, but i’m going to guess it was how blockchain = open source trustable democracy.   There was even one ICO’ed coin vendor present.  They probably gave all the blockchain talks.

Themes that seemed absent: 

maybe its compared to other conferences, but a lot less of {insert random javascript framework here}, and a lot less of {why agile/scrum etc is good} (I think most folks agree that its better than waterfall).

About the same:

There were still several “Designer and Developers mixing” things, and several UX / UI things present as well.    Soft skills – empathy, leadership, building trust, etc – all present.

Here’s the session list in case you might have a different take: http://www.codemash.org/schedule/   (only valid until next year).

Oh, and they used an excellent conference app – “Attendee Hub”.   Highly Recommend.

If they follow convention, they should put speaker deck stuff here:  https://github.com/TechConf/CodeMash2018 

What did I get out of things? 

This is where this post becomes basically for future me – but hey, its a nice checklist to see if any of these are things you’d want to know about.   I’m going session by session, trying to grab people information and slide deck information for those that I’d want to refer to later.    

AWS Security Essentials

I only crashed the end of this one, but the guy was running through a lot of tools and things to make life easier.    Have not found his slide deck.  Some examples were things like setting up audits for various things (root account login, new user created), and rules like (too many decrypts = auto invalidate key).   @abedra

Getting Started With Deep Learning

I finally understood the reasons for h(X) and bias and a fitness function, and backpropogation (instead of genetic algorithms), and why calculus (and not any old fit function).    Excellent presentation. @sethjuarez.  Asked him for slide deck.  https://github.com/sethjuarez/Digitz/tree/master/presentation  Right at the end got into non-deep vs deep and a lightbulb happened for me.   He said he was going to be doing a channel 9 on this, we were his guinea pigs.

Avoiding Microservice Megadisasters

a) immuntability = key.  Your service’s SLA matters, even if you call others .. can get copies of data as long as you don’t change them.  This, btw, is the same idea in Rust’s concurrency model – you can “borrow” ownership, only the owner can mutate.   So, yes by all means do a microservice that does one thing well, but everybody should cache rather than call and everybody knows who the single point of authority is for some data.    Also, “Order” == too generic, your service might deal with a Sales Order vs a Customer Order vs .. different shapes of models.

b) reiterated that if you have two things which are 99.99% available, then together they are way less than that available.   And localhost is not a valid network layer testing option in microservices world.

Machine Learning at Scale

Once again, I crashed the end of this one and wished I had been there.  Basically, “here’s all the nouns”.   Stuff like “Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit”, “Caffe2”, “Tensorflow”, “Chainer”, “MxNet”, “Torch” (those were all on one slide), and  some edge things – CoreML (apple), Tensorflow Lite, Caffe2Go.  Definitely want to find the slide deck for this because nouns.  @mwinkle.

Project Vienna

I didn’t stay for the full thing, but it gave me the overview of Azure “experimentation account” (building models, workspaces, projects) vs “model management” vs “deployment”.    Inexpensive, mostly just pay for bits to store data.  @jennifermarsman  .. hey she’s giving the keynote at CodePaLousa 2018!

Guy Royce – D&D meets Machine Learning

That’s not the name of it exactly, but hey, its Guy, and Guy does D&D really really well.  Excellent overview of the kinds of questions that ML can solve, put in a fun digestible form.  He’s one of the speakers who it doesn’t matter what they’re doing, I know it will be entertaining (for me).

What I did find out is that Guy is working for a company called Nexosis  who we had just chatted with in the hallway.   Its like this:  Software is eating the world, ML is eating Software, so … enable devs to get into ML easier.  Its by the guys who wrote a counterstrike cheater detector.  

Prod Deployments Easiest part of the day

This guy works for Kroger, and .. Kroger is way cooler on the tech and process side than I knew.   We talked about blue/green and red/black / canary deployments.. we talked about backward compatible state migrations allowing db changes to go in a day early.   we talked about committing dead code, feature toggles, that kind of thing.    The next day, for breakfast, the speaker, @StephenShary happened to sit with us, and there was an awesome conversation that happened.   Very good.

Digging into Devops with Terraform

I went to another talk, left, crashed this one and wished I had started here.   @dustyburwell.  Slides for digging out all the nouns: https://github.com/dustyburwell/DevopsWithTerraform.   We did cover lifecycle strategy create before destroy and how that helps with blue/green deployments (assuming you package down to an AMI, which is apparently what Netflix does)

Public Speaking Without Barfing on your Shoes

Especially relevant as we’re going to be submitting talks for conferences pretty soon as part of work.    @reverentgeek hits it out of the park.   https://github.com/reverentgeek/public-speaking  has a link to a recording done of this talk.

Image Recognition with Convolutional Neural Networks

Excellent talk by a hobbyist.  I now understand “Convolutional” (reduces complexity in dealing with images and more like how our brain does eye stuff).. and he showed all the code in training a model, bringing it into an iPhone app with CodeML, and then having his phone hot-recognize numbers live.  @timle8n1  https://github.com/timle8n1/codemash2018

So You Know How to Code (Group Trivia Challenge)

Sponsored by HMB, who are a totally cool company (been watching them for a few years – I feel they are legit.  All their folks are genuinely happy, and not sales-person-ey).   If you get a chance to do this, definitely participate.  You’re lumped into groups of 10, so no individual pressure – you can stay totally silent if you don’t know and still win.   In fact, our group won. Smile  

Rust

I had forgotten what the language was about .. did this for a quick reminder.  My ex-coworker @joeybratton brings it up every now and again at Skyline, so I did this one for him as it were.   Yeah, basically a same-speed-as-C-but-safer approach to compiling things, and as mentioned above, a better concurrency model.   Apparently since the last time I looked at it, it now has a much better library system, including stuff like diesel to let it talk ORM to databases and stuff.  There’s some crazy benchmarks out there, like 33x faster than C# in some compute intensive cases.

Performance in R

I attended this to get a refresher in R .. and yeah, this guy knows his stuff.  @thoolihan https://github.com/thoolihan/RPerformance

Looking Forward

I’ve cleared it with my wife, that pending other things not getting in the way, I’ll do a few more conferences this year.  They serve to keep my battery charged, and remind me that I’m part of a pretty big ecosystem .. and lets me see for myself the movement in that ecosystem in real people.

I’m also going to keep an eye out on https://substratum.net/  .. they brought blockchain to this conference, and they’re seeking to ensure that the internet / web hosting stays democratic / not central entity controlled / censored.   I support that cause.  I’ll back that up by buying up some SUB when I get home (wish I had known about ICO’s back when it was open .. and yeah, having a hardware wallet sucks when you don’t have it with you).   

More playing around with Cryptocurrencies

I understand a lot more now.    A lot of thanks to @sirajraval who does amazing in-depth videos about all kinds of applied computer science things.

I am not a .. whatever the words are.  Advice-giver-fundy-wundy-thingy-wingy.  I’m just a guy.  If you things you’re getting advice in me, you’ll probably loose money on those bets. Smile 

I think the Idea of cryptocurrency is great. There’s definitely a need for a mathematical, un-corrupt-able middle man know as Math.    Something along the lines of “We can all agree this is the truth, that this ledger is accurate”, something that cannot be fudged.  

Note that in these screenshots, I have not masked any of the amounts.  Yo, this is chump change guys.  I spend more on coffee.    I can’t help it that BTC went up 75x making it valuable.

Inventory

First, an Inventory of various Crypto Currencies of various flavors .. these are the ones I’ve been interested in.

  • I think Bitcoin (BTC), while famous, is not going to be the long term winning solution. 
    • But because its famous, people are throwing themselves at it
    • Which causes it to bounce all over the place
    • Which excites lots of other people
    • Which causes it to bounce even more
    • It can only handle so many transactions per second
    • Lots of people want to transact in it
    • Which leads to really large transaction fees (you have to volunteer in to a large transaction fee or your transaction gets ignored in favor of others who volunteered a large transaction fee).
      • I was moving BTC over to my hardware wallet, the fee was $35 at the time, regardless of how much I moved.
    • There’s plenty of supply left
    • There’s plenty of people in the world, ie, untapped demand, left
    • So its going to bounce around a while longer I think.    As long as there are curious people out there.
    • Will likely get relegated to “how to move large sums of money around” more than “small transactions” just because of the upscaling of transaction fees.
  • There’s Ethereum as well (ETH)
    • Its ability to do contracts .. ie, programming .. ie, stuff like giving somebody a loan, getting back payments, and calculating here’s how much balance is left given an interest rate ..
    • you don’t have to trust anybody else to say what the balance is.  The math is all there in the contract, and its enforced by shared truth
    • At the same time, if somebody mis-writes a contract … that’s going to be interesting.
    • Siraj:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Qs0XdPpw8
  • I did some digging around, and I found Monero (XMR)
    • Its the not-traceable one.  Can’t tell who gave how much to whom —
    • you have a secret A, which gives you a receive address B and a view key C.
    • Any time you want to get paid, you say “send it to B”
    • If you want to see if somebody got paid, you need their view key C to see if they got paid.  If you don’t know the view key, you have no idea who paid what to whom or how much.
    • Pretty sure folks will use it for illegal purposes.
    • Its one of the easiest ones to use, GUI wise.
    • You can still mine this for profit with a mid-range CPU.
    • So I think it will be pretty stable / get famous (or infamous) / have value.
    • Siraj:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjbHqvr4ffo
  • There’s a fork of Bitcoin called Bitcoin Cash (BCH) —
    • Lots of people owned bitcoin at the fork date ==> they all own bitcoin cash now as well.
    • Its much easier to transact than BTC, with much lower transaction fees.   Must faster, too.
    • It has a good chance of future survival.
  • And then I found Iota (IOTA)
    • No miners!
    • When you want to do a transaction, you volunteer in to doing at least 2 confirmations.  So its a .. pay it forward kind of thing.  “The more people use it, the faster it gets”.
    • Siraj: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B37UbzPlSzw

Tools and Services

This is what I’m familiar with so far:

  • Coinbase.com  — this is how I converted my dollars into cryptocurrency.     I have it set up to take about $15 from every paycheck and spread that over BTC and ETH at the moment.  I inherited some BCH due to the split, and I did dabble in some LTC but I got rid of it once BCH came around. 
  • trezor.io – this is a Hardware Wallet that I purchased, and moved most of my BTC and ETH to.
    • Sounds fancy.  All it is, its… like a flash memory thing.  It has some unique numbers stored on it.  There’s no way to directly read those numbers off it.. all you can do is log in to it, and say “here sign this thing with those numbers”. 
    • If it gets damaged or whatever, there’s a list of 24 words to use .. written on paper .. in my safety deposit box … that can be used to reconstruct the unique numbers used.    It happens to be that its a “standard” way of doing this, so even if Trezor dies and you can’t get another device like that, there’s several other wallet systems which will accept the 24 words to get back to the secret keys
    • The unique numbers are what give you access to the math that’s stored in the blockchain, the “shared ledger” across several hundred thousand computers around the internet.
  • binance.com – this is one of many exchanges that exchange value between cryptocurrencies.  Use it to quickly convert ETH or BTC to other coins. 

Converting ETH to IOTA and XMR

This was a wild ride for me, so here’s a quick summary —

  • I signed up for an account.   They do email verification.
  • I locked my account up using 2FA.
  • I deposited ETH (it gave me an address to send the ETH to.. i went to coinbase and sent it).  Turns out I had to do it twice, because there’s minimums involved in withdrawing which are around $30 USD equivalent.   Here’s what that looked like:

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  • I went to the ETH/IOTA trading screen and exchanged ETH for IOTA. (Somebody else had IOTA and wanted ETH, the exchange helped us find each other).
  • Ditto, ETH/XMR
  • The screens for this are crazy with candle graphs and stuff.  Made me feel super finance nerdy.   There’s also limit and stop limit orders and stuff .. great if you want to day-trade-gamble.
  • Once done, I withdrew funds from IOTA and XMR  to my IOTA and XMR wallets.

Here’s what that looked like on the Binance side:

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Here’s what it looks like in the Monero wallet:

image  .. as it scans for more transactions involving me.

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Here’s what it looks like in the Iota wallet:  

image image 

yep, still pending.. there was congestion here, need to wait till other transactions happen which will in turn then verify the above transaction.   (the 0 transaction was me clicking “attach to tangle”, which I didn’t understand at the time, but was basically saying “yo say something so that this wallet is established somehow even if nobody gave it money”.)

Whee!   So now I have some money locked up in a wierdo thing that only other wierdos would recognize my money in.  Ie, I’ve made my money LESS USEFUL!   Whee!

Taxes

So, tax season is about here.   There used to be doubt, but now its been removed, so this is pretty much how I’m going to do it regarding the US Tax code – although this doesn’t take effect till the 2018 season .. but:

  • All transfers into and out of a wallet are short or long term capitals gains, based on the crypto/USD value at the time of the timestamps involved.   Regardless if you’re sending it to another wallet that you own or not.
  • (there’s some flexibility for which crypto/USD index to use, i’ll find something with an API)
  • Coinbase provides a FIFO calculator, which is excellent – they are the bulk of my everything, and the point where my USD happens.   I’ll pretty much use that for my taxes, and count transfers to other wallets as short term gains (if applicable).   Future lesson is, if something is going to appreciate a lot, PARK IT AT ITS FINAL LOCATION QUICKLY before it starts appreciating to avoid tax penalties.
  • I ran some math to figure out how much of a difference things make .. other than making everything short term rather than long term, moving the money to another account in the same currency doesn’t do much on the taxes – the nets are the same. 
  • At some point, somebody’s going to write some decent tax software to go along with owning crypto currencies .. or they’ll write it for the tax guys so that the tax guys can tell you what you SHOULD have paid.   Something like https://bitcoin.tax/  probably. 

Okay, that’s about it.     The only other thing to throw out there would be, because Bitcoin went up so much, I cashed out enough of it so that even if it (or any of my other coins) went down to $0, I’d still have made money on them, not be in the hole.       Good place to leave off the end of the year, I think.

Cheers, laterz.

Oh, I’m running simpleminer.io to mine XMR while I’m using my PC’s.    Haven’t gotten any XMR payout yet. 

No Post in October??

Wow.  I didn’t post at all in October.    Things I could have posted about, in no particular order:

  • My Birthday Present — Android Tablet in my car — configuration, usage
  • Trip to Las Vegas — 360 video
  • Segmenting work into Interruptible vs Focus vs People.
  • Further experiments in remembering every project I ever worked on and classifying them in various ways.
  • How much I’m liking how my workplace is developing.
  • Water leaks
  • Trip to Morgantown – 360 video of PRT.
  • Stranger Things
  • Running in Teslagear shoes — did a 5k in them!
  • Diagnosing, analyzing, and processing old emotional pain

But yeah, … its been crazy, and I haven’t had the bandwidth to do a proper post.

I did, however, update the … tagline? second line? of my blog.  Having watched Stranger Things Season 1, I really liked Dustin’s Line: “Why Are you Keeping This Curiosity Door Locked!”   … so yeah, inspired.

More time in the future.  Lots of things I could write posts on.   Later!

 

Visualizing Bitcoin Adventures

I’ve been riding a Bitcoin (and Ethereum) roller coaster for a year .. and its been a fun little diversion.   However, its hard to see the journey .. it feels like I’ve come out ahead, but have I really?

I doodled various (complicated) ways to try to show stuff via a 3D graph .. but when I actually went to play, this 2D version works just as well:

image

  • Vertical (down) drops ==  I transferred bitcoin (either to another account, or buying something with bitcoin).
  • To the top-left = I bought bitcoin for USD
  • To the bottom-right = I sold bitcoin for USD (for buying something usually)
  • Note: A similar chart would exist for my Ethereum account.  No, i did not buy a switch for $90, it was more than that.
  • Steep curve vs Shallow curve gives a feeling for price.   buy Steep, sell Shallow is the desire.
  • I could beat myself up .. if only I hadn’t spent the bitcoin, I’d have so much more now…
  • Currently, my experiment is net-positive.  Even if bitcoin goes to $0 right now.

How I created this

  • Download transaction report from Coinbase.   This is a .CSV file, which I then open in excel.
  • Their report has a “Amount” (Column C) which has + for bitcoin added, – for bitcoin removed.
  • Their report has a “Transfer Total” (Column H) .. but it isn’t signed. 
  • Their report also has a Transfer Fee column .. I’m ignoring that for this graph.    I did sum it up, I’ve paid $30 in fees this year.
  • Add a new column, “Signed Transfer Total”   formula is something like “=IF(H27<>0,H27*SIGN(-C27),0)” – to get a signed USD column.  Note that I’m reversing the sign so that a plus in bitcoin is a minus in USD.
  • Add a new column, “USD Balance”, which sums up all the Signed Transfer Total to date.   Something like “=SUM(J$6:J27)”.  For simplicity I added it right next to their bitcoin balance column
  • Grab those two columns and chart it, scatterplot, lines
  • Adjust the vertical size of the graph till you get something that works for you.  

In summary

I do not regret this Bitcoin experiment.

I do hope to leave stuff in Bitcoin, i think it will continue to grow for a while.

Upgrading my ReFS

I got a larger capacity drive to upgrade my ReFS (Resilient File System, Windows 10 “RAID” array) with.. also, most of my drives are >5y old, and I’m running low on capacity, so I better start upgrading before the world starts upgrading me.

Here’s what it looked like before the upgrade:  (“Manage Storage Spaces” are the magic words to Start->Search for):

image

Now I’m going to save this draft post, open up the computer, and unhook the 931G drive (if I can find it) while the machine is running to simulate a fault.

DANG! I have two 1TB disks.  Oh wait, one is a WDC and the other is a Seagate.   Cool.   The WDC is the one to unplug.

The WDC is unplugged!  It hasn’t figured it out yet.. Opening up the drive … drive opened..  WinDirStat to exercise the array .. 

there we go.  “Reduced Resiliency”

image

Okay, cool.  I’ll power down the machine and swap out the drive.

The Storage Spaces UI is unchanged – the (now removed) drive shows up with the yellow icon.

I have a new drive in regular Disk Management:

image

First, I click Change Settings .. I tried to find a way to remove the old drive, but I couldn’t find one.

So I went with adding in the new drive first.  I clicked “Add Drives” —

image

Once it was happier with the drives, the option to remove the errant drive showed up. 

image

I clicked “Remove”, and it asked me to confirm the drive that I was removing ..

image

This took a LONG time.   From 7:20pm to  9:38pm, so about 2 hours.  Opening up a second Storage Spaces UI, i could see the drive listed as “Preparing for Removal”, which I think meant “I’m going to find all the stuff that was supposed to be on this drive and make sure it is elsewhere”.    (Confirmed – the % used started dropping slowly.) 

The other thing I didn’t realize is I had to increase the size of the storage space to use the new free space in the storage pool.

And… I’m going to post this before its all done.  But basically:    I now have about 3TB of Mirrored Space.  I’m also Resilio-Syncing the important bits to an off-site backup.  So, any two of three things could die, and I should still be good.

Switching from iPhone to Android (Samsung S7)

img_20170903_110354_847I wanted to write a nice detailed blog post with pictures and screenshots. Would take too long to get it “Perfect” so I am punting.  (I did write this using the WordPress app on the phone)  ** I continued this from my laptop later.

Here are crib notes instead.

Summary: it’s good, it’s functional. It’s less pretty on the watch side, and MMS is subpar, but better voice recognition, LastPass integration, wireless charging make up for that. I’m going to stick with it for a year.

Addendum: it’s frustrating to learn a new ecosystem. And because Android has so many variations it’s hard to know what information applies. For example – getting that screenshot in this post – there is probably a better way but I had to use Google voice to take it, send it to WordPress media library, then include it in this post.   (Addendum to the dum:  Turns out there’s a “swipe left with your palm” gesture for my phone, but I still can’t save the screenshot to my camera roll)

Stuff I like:

  • Chat heads – if I use FB messenger for SMS.  They pop open over any app, and let me continue a conversation without switching apps.
  • Voice recognition is better – especially in the car.  It seems to want to use the phone’s microphone, rather than the 3 second delay switching to bluetooth through the car microphone.
  • Can choose default apps – like which Messenger app to use.    Thank you “Intentions”.
  • Widgets – Not going crazy with this, I only have two or three.
  • Not all apps on home screen – I can leave some in the drawer.  I don’t have to force myself to choose a position for EVERY FRICKING APP, just the ones that matter.
  • Always on screen – specific to my Samsung S7 device?   Shows time, date, next calendar appointment, etc before I hit the power button.   Major phone use case.
  • Number row – by default, turned on, on the keyboard.  Also a swipe keyboard, very nice for one hand use.
  • Better large screen shrinking – for single hand use.  Much more usable than Apple’s double-finger-home-button thing that never worked for me.
  • Last pass for apps – incredibly useful, when I’m in an App, Lastpass can integrate in and provide passwords.
  • Wireless charging – Coworker Steve gave me his old wireless charger.  I’m hooked.  No plugging in.  I bought one for the car, and I need to buy one for home.
  • Workout app has better sharing options – Pretty pictures, square format, straight to instagram, YES.
  • S2 watch can control which notifications go to watch and which dont.
  • Way more watch faces – This is also a curse.  I could not find a decent watch face which had battery, calendar, date, time, and actually worked across my multiple calendars.
  • I can put any icon anywhere on the page – I don’t have to plan from the top.   Thank God.  Clusters are easier to cluster.

What I miss:

  • Miss pretty emoji – I’m used to the iPhone and Slack emoji sets.  I don’t know for sure when I send my wife a kiss-with-eyes-closed emoji that its showing up the same.
  • Hue / OK Google integration misses things – I’ll say turn the lights off, and it will say “I got 18 of them, three not responding”, but only 8 will change.
  • Miss overcast podcast player with it’s auto silence trimming – For this reason alone, I have my de-SIM’ed iPhone living in the car, being an iPod for playing podcasts.
  • Group messaging wierdness interacting with iMessage – I won’t get pictures or video.  My entire family is iOS based, so I’m at a disadvantage.
  • Miss sharing position easily (find my friends) – Wife and I used to use this in passive always-on mode.  i can do Glympse for limited engagements.  I think Google has a solution for this somewhere.
  • Text selection wierd no magnifying glass for fine control – it took me a while, but I finally (with writing this post) got a handle on the text select stuff.  I have to take this back – I prefer the Android one.  I can actually drag the little draggers around, and they snap intelligently.   But I do miss the magnifying glass.
  • Miss square Apple Watch – It was smaller, looked better, and seemed more functional – especially the voice command part.
  • Miss scroll to top.
  • S2 battery life not great.   However, if I turn on Airplane mode (the S2 has its own 3G connection that I haven’t activated), its very comparable – down to 50% at the end of the day.

Btw, the screenshot is my second screen, not my home screen.

 


Optimizing Cycling

Now that we have youtube, I watched some videos on “Fitting” a cycle.  Armed with that info – maybe my bicycle is not the best fit for me, but I could change some things.

imageI rode the same route three times .. ignore the dark part, that’s me putting the app on “pause”, but apparently it continues to record while doing so, which is actually great.  Its about 1.1 miles mostly up-hill.  I did it three times ..

Look at the pink.  That’s my speed going up the hill.  Note how second and third ones were definitely better.

Look at orange.  That’s my heart rate.  Look at how second and third ones were higher.

Here’s what it was: 

  • My seat was not high enough.  As a result, on the downstroke, at the 3pm point, my knee was actually out beyond where the pedal was – which brings some strain into the system. As a result, my legs hurt  .. kneecaps back to hamstrings .. so my heart couldn’t drive my legs as hard as my heart actually could.
  • 2nd trial – I brought my seat up about 2 inches ** , so that my leg was almost fully straight but my foot still parallel to the ground when the pedal was at its lowest.    I also inflated my tires up to 70 (they were at 40 before), which maybe helped some as well – although you’d think you’d see that on the downhill.  I guess air resistance trumps rolling resistance there.  ** because the seat rises up and to the back, raising the seat also moved me back a little bit. 
  • 3rd trial – I brought my seat up another inch or so, so that my foot points a bit down at the lowest spot.  It also for sure got my knee behind the line of the pedal when the pedal is at 3 o’clock.  It was a bit uncomfortable, but … seemed smoother, and .. the heart rate vs speed graph seems to agree.   I also reinstalled the bar-ends so that my hand position was further out, and I think that shows up in the downhill speed (the part not marked with pink) is higher for this trial. 

This could also all be B.S.   It could also be that:

  • The evening progressed and it got cooler
  • I drank more water so the weight of the bike went down
  • I got more properly warmed up.

Things I did not do that would probably make things even better:

  • Put my seat further back.  Its as far back as it can go.
  • Use a lighter bicycle.  Mine is a hybrid with shocks and stuff .. quite heavy.
  • Take off my very heavy bicycle pack (leftover from RAGBRAI.  I needed somewhere to stick my towel and other stuff for my commute to work.  Don’t leave home without your towel!  (Don’t panic!)

Things that I am doing already:

  • I’m using .. clips?  and cleats?  I don’t know the names of them.  Basically, i have power on the upstroke as well, I just have to remember to try to bring my knees up to touch my arms.

The real test will be riding to work .. I hope on Monday .. and compare that against last Monday, see how I do.

I am excited.