Walking & Ice

It's just so much nicer to get outdoors in the winter that I think I'll focus on cross country skiing and walking rather than indoor exercise (Nordic Track or stationary bicycle). All well and good but it's sometimes difficult to walk with the snow and ice that remain on sidewalks around here. A few years ago I happened on a device consisting of a set of shoe add-ons called "Yaktrax". They are stretchable and the bottom has a series of criss-crossing and tightly woven metal springs. When they are on your feet, they provide extremely reliable footing in slippery conditions, even ice. However, that first set did not stay on my shoes extremely well and it didn't take more than a season of walking for some of the rubber stretch parts to break apart. But, liking the sure footing when they worked, I decided to try again and now I have a pair of Yaktrax Pro attachments. Their initial test period started today and they fit very well. They also have an additional velcro strap across the top that allows them to be better positioned and maintained in that position on the shoes. So they worked great ... and we'll see how long they last.

So I've decided that the motorcycle's time is over for the year and, most probably, the bicycle's too. But, while I'm ready for spring already, winter is interesting in its own way. And it will be fun to ski, not to mention singing in many new places as I tour the rest homes in Cedar Rapids.

It feels like just a regular year coming up in 2009 ... we'll see, eh?

Riding In December in Iowa

Today could very well have been my last bicycle ride for the year. There are 3671 miles on the odometer and it looks like cold, snowy weather for the foreseeable future ... sigh. Of course, hope springs eternal and, after all, the year isn't over ... yet.

Latest news is that the hard drive on the Mac does not restart reliably upon returning from "sleep" mode. I'm pretty convinced it's the drive itself as it has been gradually (over the past month or so) taking longer and longer to "kick in" and start spinning up after I wake the computer. That time has gone from practically zero to 5 to 20+ seconds and in the past few days it has failed to start at all. So now my only issue is to decide whether to just buy a new 500GB Seagate drive for about $69 or spend time on the phone with Apple support and get to the same point, with significantly more aggravation, in about 2 weeks. Of course, it is possible that something else (memory, some other hardware component, maybe even software) is the problem. And then I would kick myself for wasting time on the Hard Drive replacement. But I don't think it voids the warranty ... I'll have to check it out.

Hope everyone got a chance to see Jupiter, Venus and the crescent Moon (the 3 brightest objects in the earth's night sky) in conjunction last night just after sunset.

It's Winter ...

Today's ride was not a sure thing to happen as we got about 2" of snow here and then it's been snowing during the day. But the temp has been holding at 32 and so the snow has not been sticking to the pavement. I couldn't resist and it worked out very well. Even took time to rinse the bike off and dry the chain (otherwise it will rust pretty quickly as it's not well lubed right now) after I got back. Mileage at the end of the ride was 3645 and I now have 238 hours in on the bicycle (and the Neuro 4.0 cyclometer) this year. The Neuro is still going strong on its original batteries so it's clear that it can go for a year (well, at least one of my year's) of riding. H-mmm looks like on the year I'm averaging a bit over 15mph, and that seems like a pretty good number.

Feels like a good day for some hot soup and a Kielbasa sandwich. Maybe a little football watching and then I'll look into finding another rest home to sing at. That's really quite fun.

Balmy Day ...

Nice riding today as it was about 42 when I went out at 1pm. I'll hit 3600 miles for the year with the next workout. Nice improvement after many days of temps between 27 and 35 degrees (and windy). Nice breeze today, only about 10mph from the south.

Looks like I'll be heading up to Fargo for Thanksgiving ... and most likely I'll leave on Wednesday afternoon (that way I can get my mail before heading out). I'll likely return by Friday evening. Well, if I have things organized ahead of time I'll probably whip up a pumpkin pie on Wednesday morning and take it up for the Thanksgiving meal.

Good news as the Hawks won (big) over Minnesota yesterday and the Vikings won today ... all in all a pretty good football weekend.

Finished converting about 75-80% of my music files to FLAC, so that's getting close to being done. Not quite ready to delete all the WAV's I have yet since, if I need them again, I'd have to either recreate them from the FLAC files or re-rip them. Someday soon, I'll delete them but it feels better to keep them around for awhile ... at least as long as I have the storage space. I have been deleting the equivalent ogg and mp3 files but I also have a backup of those on the portable karaoke drive (as they can be used by the karaoke player software).

Later ...

Singing ... Again

Tonight was the culmination of quite a bit of work getting all my karaoke disks on my (mostly unused) Toshiba laptop. I gathered all the necessary equipment in my cloth music bag (also used for getting groceries) and brought along the Fender amp system. Stopping in at the rest home on Council Street, I asked if I could do a test run and set things up to see how they worked (and whether or not I'd forgotten anything!). They said "sure" and so I set it up and everything worked, first time. So I sang for almost an hour and it seems that most of them enjoyed the music. It is fun ... and I'll be doing it more often and probably at several different places. It's always a good gig, after all, because you have a captive audience and if you're at all off key, they usually can't tell ... and they truly enjoy the music.

Hopefully, I have enough of a music selection to satisfy most of the audience ... but I'm going to try to get a few more of the real old oldies (like Blue Heaven) as I expect they will be very well received (although I'll surely have to spend some time practicing them).

In other news, it was a cold day for riding (30 when I was out there) but not much in the way of wind and quite a bit of sunshine. It was a fun ride, although I need to decide now whether or not it will be worth my while to clean and lube the chain again before winter. The bike surely does need it as it's now squeaking pretty good but I'd rather save my time and do it in the spring just before starting to ride again. However, if I'm going to get a few hundred more miles in this Fall (depends on the weather), then now is the time. Well, I guess it'd be best to do it now ... finally talked myself into it. First thing tomorrow.

Later ...

Good Riding Week

With a total of 109 miles this week, it should be easy to hit 3500 in the next day or so and it's pretty clear that 3600 miles is a good possibility for 2008.

I've spent quite a bit of time lately converting my CD rips (WAV) to FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec). Track by track, album by album, I'm converting my Sonos network files to FLAC (from the current ogg/mp3 formats). Since my experience is that the FLAC files take only about 60-70% as much space as the (also lossless) WAV versions, I plan to use them as my CD backups.

The conversion process is fairly easy and, depending on one's plans, it might work well to use a handy setup like AutoFlac. For me, I had already ripped the WAV's to a hard drive using EAC so the issue was converting WAV's to FLAC and I've found that FooBar2000 does an exceptional job at this. I use a straightforward program called Tag & Rename to update the file tags (it works for ogg, mp3, etc., as well) and then update my online (Sonos NAS hard drive) files. Although I did take the step of backing up all my MP3/OGG files on a separate drive since it's really nice to have those for "carrying your music" type devices. Incidentally, FooBar2000 also converts FLAC files to OGG and to MP3 (I used Oggenc and LAME as the encoders for these). Since it will also convert FLAC to WAV, it's fairly easy to recreate CD's if necessary, from the FLAC backups. To do this, generally speaking, however, I recommend generating cue files during the CD ripping process (EAC has this functionality). It's not essential but it's an easy way to ensure that you can produce and exact duplicate of a CD (not critical for me).

Later ...

3400, Finally

Hit 3408 miles for the year on today's ride. Conditions were a bit nicer in that it was warmer (about 37 degrees) even though there was some rain and about 10mph of easterly wind today. Riding with temperatures in the 30's is really not too bad. I think it's pretty likely that I'll reach 3500 unless we get snow and/or significantly colder temps that result in icy road surfaces. Then it *will* be time to hang up the riding shoes for the year. I need to be focused on using the Nordic Track and getting out for Cross Country skiing on a regular basis this winter though as it makes the bicycling startup much easier in February/March and I'm just not big on riding indoors.

Well, winter's sliding in pretty quickly so, as with many things in life ... we'll just have to wait and see what happens.

Later ...