blaze bike light

Laura OLPH sent me this link to an article about the Blaze Laserlight. It's cool illuminating the model's hand, above, but what it really does is put a glyph of a bike on the road about five meters (16 feet) in front of the cyclist.

It uses the green laser, which is famously stronger than the common red one. From the article:

The Blaze Laserlight is a front LED headlight that also shines a neon green bike symbol onto the ground 16 feet in front of the bicyclist. That way, drivers know someone’s in their blind spot and hopefully won’t turn into a cyclist’s path.

 At about $200, it's not cheap. And Laura writes, "I think that by the time the driver figures out where the rider is with respect to the laser image, the driver will have hit the cyclist out of sheer distraction." That may be, and we know that drivers don't see what they're not looking for (that second link is to the famous basketball-gorilla video)... but this thing might actually grab attention. I don't do enough night riding to make it worthwhile, but if I did, I'd be tempted to try it.

more bike fashion

This article on Bikeradar starts:

For a long time there were three options for high quality cycling clothes; plain, eurocentric, or team replica. Unhappy with these core choices, a few Australian designers have decided they would offer something fresh and unique. Using everything from blinding fluorescent colours to animal prints, these small startups are changing the way cyclists dress.

I'm not sure they're going to change the way I dress. Here are some samples from the gallery:

Above: I likes me some pink socks. Below: Camo? I thought part of the reason for the brightly-colored kits were to INCREASE visibility...

In other news, I can see that in order to be taken seriously as a cyclist, I'm going to have to get some tattoos, or grow some interesting facial hair. (Who am I trying to kid? If there were a bicycle version of a button-down collar and khakis, that's what I'd be wearing.)

how I'm holdin' up

The email from Laura OLPH had a subject line of "Hey, Grumpy", and said, simply, "How ya holdin' up?"

My reply:

Surprisingly well, given the infernal weather, the forced isolation, and the fact that my weight appears to have developed the curious property of moving solely in a single direction (which is not down). I spent two days this week at a training, required by my supervisors, with four other staff members from my region. Not only was it a better training than I would have expected, but the coworkers and I got conversant (we had never been close, not due to dislike, but rather due to never having had reason to get close, or time to spend together). That was Tuesday/Wednesday; on Thursday we were closed for the snow, and on Friday we had a late open; despite that, I'm not swamped with work (although Monday is a holiday, and things may be difficult by Tuesday).

In other news, I've set myself a task of drawing for an hour a day (I'm using some of the photos I've put on my blog as models). Five years ago, I took a beginner drawing class, and started to get god, but then I put it down, and the two times I started since, I was so disappointed with how much progress I had lost that I stopped. Now I've set this resolution to do this for a year and we'll see; if i can stick to it, I should be satisfied with my progress by next mid-winter.

And I got an email that the Bike Exchange will be starting up again; there's a volunteers meeting Tuesday. They're looking for people to take on volunteer "apprentices" (mostly Rutgers students), and I'd love to do that (doesn't it sound neat?).

I'm also pleased that Ed C is thinking of leading some rides.

I'm ALSO also pleased because a particular bête noire, a harridan who is a fellow condo board member, will not be getting her way about a particular rule she'd like to see instituted, against a neighbor who keeps a kayak on a trailer in his side yard. Yes, it's ugly, but I'm not sure that it should be a rule that he has to get rid of it, and I don't like it that we have put so many new rules into place. In this country, condo and other neighborhood boards have become tyrannies from which there is no appeal (so courts have held), and there needs to be a balance between condo rules and freedoms.

This is turning into a blog post, and it may, in fact, become one. 

 And so it has.

the business of health

From today's Oddman. (Did you see this about CVS?)

weight loss challenge update 4

Here's where we stand this week:

• Me: starting 182, last THREE weeks 181; goal under 175.
• Dave C: start 210.1, last week 210.1, this week 209.9; goal 195.
• Henry M wrote, "I think I am down a solid one pound in three weeks of semi-starvation."

   
Not reporting numbers:

• The Excellent Wife (TEW): down.

I've not heard from Lou O, John D, or Ira S.

I threw a number of hissy fits last week, at least one of which was about my inability to lose weight. New resolutions: no bagels/bread/muffins except on ride days, and buy nothing in the supermarket from the following aisles except as noted: nothing from chips/pretzels (except OK to get nuts),  nothing from cookies/crackers except granola bars, and nothing, nothing, NOTHING from sodas & sweet drinks (that won't be hard; I don't do those things anyway).

I'm eating a bowl of dry popcorn, with pepper (no salt) as I write this.

is this a good idea?

It IS easier to reach than from the downtube...

I got it from SoFreakingCool.

why nutrition is confusing, and other thoughts on weight

Laura OLPH sent me the link to this article, about why the state of the science about nutrition is confusing, The author, Gary Taubes, makes the point that doing real research on nutrition would be prohibitively expensive, and so it isn't done. Instead, we make do with a patchwork of studies on animals, and short-term, imperfect studies on humans. He says:

One lesson of science, though, is that if the best you can do isn’t good enough to establish reliable knowledge, first acknowledge it — relentless honesty about what can and cannot be extrapolated from data is another core principle of science — and then do more, or do something else. As it is, we have a field of sort-of-science in which hypotheses are treated as facts because they’re too hard or expensive to test, and there are so many hypotheses that what journalists like to call “leading authorities” disagree with one another daily.

I'm reminded of the problem in substance-abuse prevention. There's not money to do good studies, and there's not a clear idea in the field that correlation does not equal causation, so we find what appears to be a correlation between something and substance abuse, and try to reduce the something.

When I was taking basic psych in the 70's, I remember that the best theory of the time for the etiology of schizophrenia was the "schizophrenogenic mother".

Below is a graph of my weight from when I first started to manage it in 2009 through yesterday (the grey line is the daily weights; the red is the trend over the previous ten days; the graph is from Hacker's Diet Online).

For the almost-2-years, I was on a quick drop. Since then, I've been more-or-less steady with a slight tendency to rise, but in the past few months, the tendency to rise has sharpened. Some of it is simply about discipline. When I was first losing weight, my attitude was, "I'm a grown-up now; I don't get to eat the way I did when I was younger", just as I don't have the resilience to bounce back from an all-nighter that I had in my 20's (although I was never good at that). But having done this for this long, I find I keep cheating and slipping back to eating the stuff I did prior to March of 2009 (which is the junk I really like, laden with sugar, salt, white flour, & high-glycemic stuff).

My recent situation hasn't helped. I'm not getting out to ride; I'm bored; I'm stuck in the house, not seeing people I'd like to see as often as I'd like to see them. It's not fair to TEW to place all my social needs on her. Nor have I found a good project to work on. Boredom, inactivity, and low-level depression have been undermining my discipline.

But it may also be that the information out there is just not that good. I don't find, for example, that high-fat foods correlate with weight gain, if they're not accompanied by salt, sugar, and the other junk (Taubes says that I'm on the money with that). There's also a conventional wisdom that it's harder to lose weight in winter (I've seen it called the hibernation effect), but there's no good science behind it, and a lot of contradictory blather (check out this link, including the comments).

For me, after two weeks of weigh-ins above my hoped-for downward trend, I've finally been back on track the past two days. I've got to remember: that's not an excuse to relax; it's a sign that I've finally found a system that might work (or might not). But it won't work if I don't stick to it.

isn't it just a fairing?

The estimable Dave C sent me a link about this some time ago, and I've just run into it again:

From the associated article:

According to Petkovsek and his business partners, the drag coefficient of the Speed Up Bag is 60 percent lower than that of a standard handlebar bag. Additionally, use of one of the bags is said to lower the rider's own drag by approximately 15 percent, as it channels air away from the concave wind-catching surface of their chest and abdomen. This reportedly results in an average cycling speed increase of 6 percent, or 10 percent more range in the case of an electric bike.

If the use of an item increases speed by 6%, it doesn't matter if you can put something in it or not. If it were legal for racers, I'm sure they'd already have them. I'm reminded of that fully-faired recumbent on Winter Larry's ride in early December that I found so disheartening (the ride, not the bike... well the bike, too, but for a different reason).

 Besides, it's ugly. No thanks.

doin' the taxes

All the forms are in, and I had an enforced day off due to weather today (I haven't gotten a raise in four or five years, but the company for which I work is almost too generous with time off, especially if weather threatens), so I did the taxes. The Excellent Wife (TEW) says she loves it that I take on this responsibility, but it's just a matter of data entry.

I've done the taxes online for years. All of the three big tax websites, TurboTax, Taxcut (now from H.R.Block), and TaxAct, allow you to enter all the data and see what your results are for free; you've only gotta pay 'em the money when you actually want to print or file. For three or four years I did the entry on all three, and found that TaxAct reliably came across with a few extra bucks in refund (or found me a refund when the others said I had a payment due, however small), so for the past year or two I only used TaxAct. (Taxact is also about a third of the price of the others.)

I did the taxes in TaxAct today, and found we owed a few bucks to Governor Christie. Well, that was an unpleasant surprise... so I fired up the other two to see what they would say. TurboTax took a look at my non-standard operating system (I'm currently running Linux Mint Petra), and choked (if you don't use some form of Windows or Mac on your computer, they don't wanna play... although they have apps for Android and Kindle, of all things).

So I went over to Taxcut, and put in the info there. They came up with a smaller amount due the state (by $5), but also a smaller refund from the Feds (by $100), and the cost of their product for the two returns, with e-file, was about $70, as opposed to $17.99 for TaxAct.

So I've sent in the taxes via TaxAct. Your mileage may vary, of course, and we don't have kids, but we do own a house and itemize deductions. The TaxAct online system uses a Q&A model to fill out the forms, and allows you to either e-file or print-and-surface-mail. If you can read all your forms and you keep reasonable records, I recommend TaxAct.

(That image is from their site; let's see if they let me continue to link to it.)

Yeah, this is getting filed under "Stuff that Works".

weight loss challenge: update 3

I'm NOT happy with my results.

• Me: starting 182, last 181, this week 181 (if I do the decimals, I'm probably higher than last week); goal under 175.
• Dave C: start 210.1, last 206.9, this week 210.1; goal 195.
• Lou O: last 169, this week 166; goal 160.

Not reporting numbers:

• Ira S: down.
• The Excellent Wife (TEW): down.

I've not heard from John D or Henry M.

I had a bad time with some enforced idleness last week, and underbought for the lunches I bring to work... so I came home hungry and wound up eating everything except the paint off the doors. However, I got two good rides in this weekend (over 100 miles overall), and I was STILL up.

Stay away from me. I'm moping enough to bring down the mood of the veriest Pollyanna, and I obviously know nothing about losing weight.

almost a normal weekend ride with winter larry

When the weather allows two weekend days in a row where a fellow can get out and ride, it would upset Fortuna not to go... so late yesterday, I had this text exchange with Laura OLPH:

 Me: "How 'bout leave Plainsboro for Winter Larry's ride tomorrow by 8:10?

Laura: "How 'bout see ya there!

So we left from the usual start in Plainsboro, discussing volunteering, science, and other weighty topics, while I tried not to worry about frostbite setting in and removing my fingertips. We got to the start, and we saw two, then three, then more, and eventually ALL TEN of the people who finished Laura's ride yesterday showed up again today... as did six others, so we started with sixteen. Larry made two promises: that we could burn it up along Hill Road, and that we would NOT stop at the Ptomaine Ptower in Clarksburg. I promised to sweep if we needed it.

Larry was as good as his word; we did this route. We came a long way down Old York, which is not my favorite road (but it is about the most direct way of getting down there), and went over by Polhemustown, where I learned a method for a left turn in traffic that I never hope to see again! I went whipping along Hill Road, and stopped to get a picture of the barn with the Chevy-logo window (you'll see it below), just as a younger rider whose name I didn't get was about to overtake me. Old age and treachery may outdo youth and ability over the long haul, but in the sprints, bet on youth.

We stopped at the Wawa near Great Adventure, where I noticed the abundance of red winter jerseys,

Then pretty much straight back to Cranbury. As we were going through Hightstown, there was a startling report (my ear may still be ringing), and Mark H pulled over with a blowout; we sent the rest along, and I helped with the tire change. His wheel seems to have a hard time holding onto the bead of the tire, and, with just a little bit of overinflation, it let go... but a new tube and some CO₂, and we were on out way. Laura waited for me at the end, and then we rode back to Plainsboro, with nowhere near the headwind I've come to expect on that part of the ride.

Pictures? Of course pictures!

Chris in Star Wars tights. Aren't they great?

Note the Chevy logo on the barn!

Red jerseys!

The one below of Winter Larry would be a lot better if I hadn't cut off the top of his head.

(Mostly) Different red jerseys!

Above: Cheryl, layin' down the law.

bikin' in a winter wonderland

I've been a mess. A situation at home hasn't worked out as well as The Excellent Wife (TEW) and I had hoped, and then she was in a fender-bender of an accident (she's fine, but she has a bit of anxiety about driving now)... and then a new hire at my job has gotten into some legal trouble and won't be coming back. I helped to train him, and we were starting to be friends, and I was completely blindsided by this. And the frigid weather has meant that I was sittin' on my increasingly-ample posterior and eating everything except the paint on the closet door, so instead of closing in on my goal weight, it's getting away from me. For reasons big and small, I've been collecting misery.

So I was glad when I saw that the weather for this weekend indicated a probable ride today, and gladder when I saw that Laura OLPH was scheduled to lead one, and gladder still when she and a few other friends emailed around that we were going to do the Rojo's-to-Rojo's route we did earlier in the winter. And when we got to the start at Cheryl's, nine others (plus Cheryl, Laura, and me) came out to do the ride, many of them my favorite riding pals.

We did this route, which was not quite the same as the last one. With the snow, it was a beautiful ride, but the roads were almost completely clear of ice. We did the straight-up-Princeton-Pike route to the Palmer Square Rojo's, stopping for coffee (of course; this is the only ride I do on which I can count on enough coffee -- after all, my performance-enhancing substances have been caffeine and Splenda), I got pics of Chris C in another excellent pair of tights, and a picture of Theresa's spiffy paisley hat. Form there, we went to Lambertville, to the other Rojo's. With uncharacteristic democracy, Laura agreed to lead us along Alexsauken Creek Road, which was eyecatching in the snow (I lost a lovely picture of horses in the snow, alas).

After coffee-and-such at Rojo's in Lambertville, Laura again allowed democracy to triumph, and led us up Franklin, a short, attention-getting hill (there's always a hill out of Lambertville; the choice seems to be how long and drawn-out the climb will be). Laura adjusted the route so we'd have some extra miles (almost 50! Great!). I started to cramp along Woosamonsa, but I carry salt pills (after a recommendation by many riders, most notably Ken G), and they worked better than I would have thought.

As we were coming through Pennington, a car started honking and the driver telling us off... and who was it but that same Ken G! He was, I think, jealous that he wasn't along, although he had his kids in the car and I know he prizes his time with them.

And now the bike clothes are in the dryer... and I'm thinking of Winter Larry's ride for tomorrow. Would that be too much excellence?

I really needed this ride.

Pics below:

Not everybody can rock a pair of tights like Chris C!

And that is a wonderful hat on Theresa.

I got TWO pictures of Laura taking pictures. That was one.

I liked that barn from the picture above enough that I got another one.

I found the two other pics I thought I'd lost!

I am unjustifiably happy with the one above, of the barn through the trees. I don't remember where it was. I also love the one of the horses below, from Alexsauken Creek Rd.