alex chiang: web 6.0

Recently, three teenagers died in a car wreck on one of my favorite bike loops. Apparently, they were drinking and driving, and the driver (BAC of 0.067) decided it would be a good idea to push his Mustang to over 100 MPH. They hit a bunch of trees, and the car pretty much exploded, leaving so much carnage that the investigators initially couldn’t even figure out who was driving. (They solved that question by taking blood samples off the driver’s airbag and doing some DNA testing).

When I was in college, we used to joke that whoever was the least drunk would drive us home. In this accident, that actually was the case, as the two passengers had BACs of 0.183 and 0.166. The difference is, we recognized it as a joke, and didn’t actually drive drunk.

I feel bad for their families — no one should have to be subject to that sort of loss — but as for the kids themselves, they pretty much got what they deserved. Darwin wins again.

(This post originally written 30-October-2005)

I only like to post to my blog once a day. However, I like to think that I’m not so boring as to only have one thought per day. The problem is trying to remember the interesting things from a few days ago that you want to write about now, but have long since forgotten about.

Also, I want to be more like Raymond Chen, and make more people wonder if I’m real by joining his 7 AM club. So I wrote an autopilot script, except I call mine autopylot since it’s written in python. Aren’t I clever?

In any case, if you are looking for an automated way to post to your blog every day, check it out:

autopylot

(This post originally written 27-October-2005)

Overheard at a Subway, somewhere on I-80 in Iowa:

Man talking to his two young children

Yuh see keeyids, anythang and zeero is zeero. Thayat means one plus zeero is zeero.

One plus zero is one, daddy!

pause

Raight, but half of zeero is steel zeero

Last night, Jenny and I left Colorado at 7:15 pm, MDT and proceeded to sit in the car for a very long time, arriving in Macomb, IL at 9:15 AM MDT. Thanks to several large cups of coffee and a few hours sleep in the car, I am still awake, although tomorrow won’t be pretty.

I am sitting in a local college coffee bar called the Old Dairy, in the bumpkin town of Macomb, although I am being hipper than I ever have been in Ft. Collins, since I’m drinking coffee and using the free wifi here. I’m even connected to my work via the VPN so I don’t have to take an extra day of vacation. Watch out hip NYC metrosexuals, soon I’ll be plucking my eyebrows and shaving my happy trail.

In any case, I felt compelled to post since — although the food and coffee here is good — the music is horrible. Thus far, I’ve heard Chumbawumba’s “Tubthumping” and Sister Hazel’s “All For You”. In the same day. This is too much for one man to bear. Maybe I should go uber-hip and start listening to my iPod. w00t.

Update: Although sitting in a coffee bar is kinda cool, I don’t think it’s a good long term solution. The wifi is free, but I felt guilty about sitting here for so long without buying anything. Tab for today: 1 gourmet coffee: $1.50. 1 portabello mushroom sandwich + potato chips: $6.17. 1 trendy FUZE peach mango drink: $2.13.

I had the chance to play with some new software yesterday, National Geographic Topo!. After wrestling with it for a bit, I figured out how to make it mostly do what I want, which is to draw routes on a map and get an elevation profile. You would think this would be easy, but the route drawing tool is geared towards drawing freehand, and so it’s easy to be quite inaccurate. I wonder how hard it would have been for them to have created a “snap to” feature that could automatically trace along roads. I guess the primary use case of this tool would be to draw freehand routes following trails or whatever.

In essence, it’s possible to use this tool without a GPS, but it’s a lot more annoying. Still, I got it to basically work, and so I started creating some topos of the bike routes I like to ride.

http://www.chizang.net/alex/twowheels/biking.php

Enjoy.

Well, one good ride deserves another. On Saturday, Mike Brown and I rode most of the Peak to Peak highway. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me give you some backstory.

I basically went on a three day bender (evenings only), lasting from last Wednesday to Friday, getting very drunk each of those nights. Friday was probably the worst, staying up til 3:30 AM (on Saturday), and then getting the wakeup call from Mike at 7:30. I answered the phone in bed, and after hanging up, Jenny wriggles agitatedly, and mumbles, “You’re not really going bike riding, are you?” I answer “Yes.” She retorts “You boys are stupid!”, and then rolls back over and goes to bed.

Still drunk, I get up, and go outside to wait for Mike to come pick me up. I decide that sleeping on the curb until he arrives is a good idea.

He arrives, wakes me up by laughing at my stupid drunken ass, and then we get my biking gear from my house. Mike is a tactical genius, and we decide to preempt my hangover by going to the Egg and I, whereupon I inhale biscuits, gravy, eggs (over easy), home fries, and several carafes of sweet, sweet Mt. Dew. I remember being amused at the way it sat on the table, nuclear yellow, like some sort of demented poisonous orange juice.

The drive up to Estes went quickly, and after visiting the Safeway to a) pick up some supplies and b) let me take my second morning constitutional of the day, we were out of stalling options, and had no choice but to start the ride. I believe it was 10:45 AM or so by this point. A decidedly non-auspicious start to a long day.

Heading up CO-7, it is basically uphill from the get-go, and I was feeling like the dry film in our mouth you get after a night of heavy drinking. To clarify, I not only actually had said film in my mouth, but my general level of comfort was something akin to what it must be like to be some disgusting, germy mouth-film. To say that I was worried about surviving the proposed 110 mile round trip would have been understatement.

The miles crawled by, and I started feeling better, mostly because the scenery was achingly beautiful and the weather was cooperating as well. One would truly have had a heart of stone to have been unaffected by the majestic backdrop. Rolling hills with an upward trend, the climbing was relentless, and reaching Ward was a welcome reward (har har).

Mike punctured about a mile after we passed through the hamlet, and I took a lazy nap in the sun whilst Mike wrestled with his tire. While I was helpfully resting and heckling, we saw the biggest dog on the face of the planet — an Irish wolfhound. The thing reminded me of a bear. The woman walking it was actually carrying a 30-gallon Hefty garbage bag to hold all the poop that thing was capable of generating.

Tire finally fixed, the ride down to Nederland was relatively easy. There, we decided that we didn’t really want to ride back the way we came, and after talking to the friendly man in the cigarette store (having jested that we should purchase some to help our riding), we decided to bomb down CO 119 to Boulder.

Much like a drunken hookup, the ride down the canyon was fun at the time, but we quickly regretted it afterwards. Causing us consternation was the fact that we had given up several thousand feet of elevation. A quick lunch at the best pizza shop in Boulder (forget the name, but it’s NYC style pizza on Pearl St.) and my third constitutional of the day, we were ready to head back to our car.

ie, another 32 miles of climbing.

At this point, it was perhaps 4:45 pm, and I was starting to feel it. We had already ridden 73 miles at this point, and I felt we had kinda done the traditional “ride up a long way and then ride down a long way” thing. Except now we had to ride back UP again. We gritted our teeth and painfully headed back up to Lyons via CO 7.

Reaching US 36 and seeing the sign that said “ESTES PARK 20″ was somewhat demoralizing, but as we had little choice, we went up. One of the neat things we saw before it turned into nighttime was a huge snake on the side of the road. I define “neat” as “a feeling of pleasure upon witnessing something interesting, after you are a quarter mile away and have determined it is not going to bite you”.

After the sun retired and moon came out for the night shift, things got cold in a hurry. About halfway up, I stopped to put my tights and gloves back on, and we both realized that stopping for any reason was a bad thing due to the extreme pain of moving again. It’s not the mileage that kills, it’s overcoming inertia.

Hugging the side of the road, balancing in the inadequate shoulder as cars zoomed past, I went into my thousand-yard stare mode, where I effectively turn my brain off and just let it float in the aether, while my body continues to function, comfortably numb. Idiotic songs — “Ramblin’ Man” by the Allman Brothers — bounced endlessly around in the hollow confines of my skull. Cresting over the final hill on US 36 and seeing the inviting glows of Estes Park, Mike and I started whooping and performing what was possibly the worst rendition of Queen’s “We Are the Champions” in all of eternity. Seriously. It was bad.

But we ended up at the car safe and sound and when it was mentioned that we were only 8 miles from a century, there was only a half beat pause before we both pretended like the previous sentence had never been uttered, and continued to pack up and go home.

Final stats: 92.5 miles, 6:51 riding time, 13.5 mph moving average, 10851 vertical ft. climbing

• topo map and elevation profile
• pictures

I rode my first century on Saturday, riding up to Estes Park and back via the Big Thompson canyon (US-34). I was originally planning on climbing all the way up Trail Ridge Rd., but it proved to be super windy, not to mention I was feeling a little tired at this point, so I turned around. Upon arriving back in Ft. Collins, I saw that I was only 13 miles short of a century, so I went and tagged the village of Laporte to round it out. I ended up with 100.56 miles, taking about 6:43 for a moving average of 15 mph. Not too shabby for a first solo effort.

I am far from a Bush apologist. I think he did one thing right (invading Iraq) and lots of things wrong (pretty much everything else). He recently gave a speech on the Global War on Terror, which I think is one of the best speeches he’s ever made. Money quote:

Over the years these extremists have used a litany of excuses for violence — the Israeli presence on the West Bank, or the U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia, or the defeat of the Taliban, or the Crusades of a thousand years ago. In fact, we’re not facing a set of grievances that can be soothed and addressed. We’re facing a radical ideology with inalterable objectives: to enslave whole nations and intimidate the world. No act of ours invited the rage of the killers — and no concession, bribe, or act of appeasement would change or limit their plans for murder.

And that is why we need to keep fighting the terrorists. Because they won’t give up if we do. They’ll just keep fighting forever, so the only solution is to squash them like the cockroaches they are.

Read the entire speech here: President Discusses War on Terror at National Endowment for Democracy .