Muni Leg Break from Boffy Da Unicyclist on Vimeo.
I've yet to do worse than a sprained ankle - hopefully there are no broken bones in my future.Friday, 18 December 2009
Someone breaks a leg while unicycling on Mount Vic!
Snapped femur. Ouch. Can't believe he actually has video of it happening!
Tuesday, 15 December 2009
International Backup Awareness Day
Whoops. Jeff Atwood loses most of his blog and has to rebuild it from stuff scavenged from around the web: International Backup Awareness Day
Time to review and test my own various backups, I reckon.
Monday, 14 December 2009
Quote of the day
When a co-worker said he didn't want his kids getting the H1N1 vaccine because it was too new and "they haven't tested it enough", I blurted out something like, "So you'd rather test a new and poorly understood virus on them instead?"- Commenter on Bruce Schneier's blog
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Unicycling Makara Peak - summit
I've been on a few more weekend unicycling trips to Makara Peak since the ankle incident, now kitted out with ankle braces, and this week with some elbow pads as well following some scrapes and bruises last week. Ankle is mostly recovered now despite continued weekend abuse.
Last Sunday and yesterday I managed to reach the summit, via the very rocky Missing Link, and the long uphill Aratihi track.
The uphill rocky parts of Missing Link are still a bit much for me, though I can manage most of the downhill.
Though mostly not very steep, Aratihi is quite a long climb, and it's still well beyond my current endurance to ride the whole of it without stopping. Yesterday though I managed to ride intermittently for maybe 2/3 of it, and tried to keep walking up during the recovery periods in between, rather than stopping completely.
After a quick rest at the cloudy and windy summit, I came back down Aratihi and found it to be just right for my current skill level - an interesting and fast downhill route, but not too tricky even when I'm really tired from the uphill. (Last week I tried to go down Ridgeline instead, and had to walk it - much too hard at the moment.) Then back along Missing Link; the downhill first half is fun, but the climb back out of the valley is the disadvantage to this route: had to walk it. Then down the 4WD track and Lazy Fern - still a favourite. By the time I reached Lazy Fern my back was aching and I was glad to reach the bottom!
I took the camera along this time - there are only a few pictures because mostly I just kept riding / falling!
Here is the gallery with the rest, and captions.
The park will have been very busy today with the Makara Peak Rally, so I'm guessing it will be pretty torn up next weekend (as if I needed any more obstacles). Next year I hope to be good enough to enter the rally on a unicycle - would be an interesting challenge. At the moment though I would just be a semi-stationary obstacle in the way of the mountain bikers!
In a week or so there is a shuttle day (4WD lifts to the summit, so you can repeatedly ride the downhills) - I'm taking the day off work to go along if the weather is decent.
Last Sunday and yesterday I managed to reach the summit, via the very rocky Missing Link, and the long uphill Aratihi track.
The uphill rocky parts of Missing Link are still a bit much for me, though I can manage most of the downhill.
Though mostly not very steep, Aratihi is quite a long climb, and it's still well beyond my current endurance to ride the whole of it without stopping. Yesterday though I managed to ride intermittently for maybe 2/3 of it, and tried to keep walking up during the recovery periods in between, rather than stopping completely.
After a quick rest at the cloudy and windy summit, I came back down Aratihi and found it to be just right for my current skill level - an interesting and fast downhill route, but not too tricky even when I'm really tired from the uphill. (Last week I tried to go down Ridgeline instead, and had to walk it - much too hard at the moment.) Then back along Missing Link; the downhill first half is fun, but the climb back out of the valley is the disadvantage to this route: had to walk it. Then down the 4WD track and Lazy Fern - still a favourite. By the time I reached Lazy Fern my back was aching and I was glad to reach the bottom!
I took the camera along this time - there are only a few pictures because mostly I just kept riding / falling!
Here is the gallery with the rest, and captions.
The park will have been very busy today with the Makara Peak Rally, so I'm guessing it will be pretty torn up next weekend (as if I needed any more obstacles). Next year I hope to be good enough to enter the rally on a unicycle - would be an interesting challenge. At the moment though I would just be a semi-stationary obstacle in the way of the mountain bikers!
In a week or so there is a shuttle day (4WD lifts to the summit, so you can repeatedly ride the downhills) - I'm taking the day off work to go along if the weather is decent.
Tuesday, 1 December 2009
Unicon XV schedule and race routes
The schedule has been posted for Wellington's upcoming Unicycle World Championships & Convention. Less than a month to go.
Also the details of most of the race routes, which are right on my doorstep.
The 10km race (pdf) is on the flat, all along the waterfront round some favourite places from my rides to work, and my first ventures out and about after I learned to ride: Queens Wharf, Frank Kitts Park, Te Papa, round the Overseas Terminal, then back to the start - 3 laps.
The 44km marathon road race (pdf) is around Scorching Bay, Shelly Bay, up the hill to the prison, over the hill to Scorching Bay again - 4 laps, with a fair bit of up and down.
The trials competition will be right behind where I work, at Odlins Plaza.
The muni crosscountry course is all over Mount Victoria, looks really steep. Here's the map:
Full size original is here. Uphill and downhill tracks still to come.
It includes some of the tracks I've been riding up recently, but some that are steeper - and 3 laps! On my 29er, at my current strength and fitness I wouldn't finish even one lap without a few rest stops.
These events should be impressive to watch.
Also the details of most of the race routes, which are right on my doorstep.
The 10km race (pdf) is on the flat, all along the waterfront round some favourite places from my rides to work, and my first ventures out and about after I learned to ride: Queens Wharf, Frank Kitts Park, Te Papa, round the Overseas Terminal, then back to the start - 3 laps.
The 44km marathon road race (pdf) is around Scorching Bay, Shelly Bay, up the hill to the prison, over the hill to Scorching Bay again - 4 laps, with a fair bit of up and down.
The trials competition will be right behind where I work, at Odlins Plaza.
The muni crosscountry course is all over Mount Victoria, looks really steep. Here's the map:
It includes some of the tracks I've been riding up recently, but some that are steeper - and 3 laps! On my 29er, at my current strength and fitness I wouldn't finish even one lap without a few rest stops.
These events should be impressive to watch.
Sunday, 22 November 2009
Quote of the day
Over-engineering is poison. It's not like doing extra work for extra credit. It's more like telling a lie that you then have to remember so you don't contradict it.Paul Graham
Terrorists sneak up on Homeland Security
Nice work.
I wonder if they came after him as he walked away? That would be particularly amusing.
Update: apparently the front of the shirt says "Not A", and apparently he survived the attack.
I wonder if they came after him as he walked away? That would be particularly amusing.
Update: apparently the front of the shirt says "Not A", and apparently he survived the attack.
Offset your Bad Code footprint today
Twisting the much-abused concept of "offsetting" carbon dioxide emissions (your "carbon footprint") by buying "carbon credits", now you can "offset" your footprint of badly-written software by buying Bad Code Offsets.
Donations go to the widely-used open source projects jQuery, PostgreSQL, and the Apache Software Foundation.
Nice idea, but that last one is enough to trigger my rant mode:
via Coding Horror
Donations go to the widely-used open source projects jQuery, PostgreSQL, and the Apache Software Foundation.
Nice idea, but that last one is enough to trigger my rant mode:
Perhaps this will help Apache Commons to actually finish and maintain a project for once!
Apache may have, according to their home page, "a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field", and be "celebrating a decade of open source leadership", but the part I have experience with - the Commons java libraries - are, despite being very widely used, hardly a shining beacon of what open source can achieve in terms of Good Code!
Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time with several of these, using them in a large java project in my day job. This has proven a very time-consuming and frustrating experience. Without exception, I have found them to be incomplete, buggy and poorly written, and often essentially orphaned, with no releases in several years despite numerous reported critical bugs. I have had to build custom versions of four of them to fix basic failures - typically things that have already been reported with submitted patches, and often things severe enough to break my production installations. Fixes contributed back to the projects generally just sit in the issue tracker, unreleased! Why even bother contributing?
Bad open source code which is free, I can tolerate, if it admits its limitations and its completely unsupported status. After all, I can (and do) fix it myself, given the permissive license.
Bad open source code which makes a lot of noise about community, claims to strive for high quality and to lead its field, provides an issue tracker and release plan, yet doesn't release contributed critical bugfixes even after several years - this I have much less tolerance for.
More than most projects, I blame the Apache Foundation and its process for this. As Paul Graham points out, process (especially ease of releasing, and hence frequency) has a lot to do with software quality and currency. Apache places a big emphasis on their community consensus process, committees, the process of gaining project committer status etc, so they should be blamed when that process fails dismally and still hasn't released known, already-implemented fixes after several years.
Apache may have, according to their home page, "a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field", and be "celebrating a decade of open source leadership", but the part I have experience with - the Commons java libraries - are, despite being very widely used, hardly a shining beacon of what open source can achieve in terms of Good Code!
Over the last few years I have spent a lot of time with several of these, using them in a large java project in my day job. This has proven a very time-consuming and frustrating experience. Without exception, I have found them to be incomplete, buggy and poorly written, and often essentially orphaned, with no releases in several years despite numerous reported critical bugs. I have had to build custom versions of four of them to fix basic failures - typically things that have already been reported with submitted patches, and often things severe enough to break my production installations. Fixes contributed back to the projects generally just sit in the issue tracker, unreleased! Why even bother contributing?
Bad open source code which is free, I can tolerate, if it admits its limitations and its completely unsupported status. After all, I can (and do) fix it myself, given the permissive license.
Bad open source code which makes a lot of noise about community, claims to strive for high quality and to lead its field, provides an issue tracker and release plan, yet doesn't release contributed critical bugfixes even after several years - this I have much less tolerance for.
More than most projects, I blame the Apache Foundation and its process for this. As Paul Graham points out, process (especially ease of releasing, and hence frequency) has a lot to do with software quality and currency. Apache places a big emphasis on their community consensus process, committees, the process of gaining project committer status etc, so they should be blamed when that process fails dismally and still hasn't released known, already-implemented fixes after several years.
via Coding Horror
Friday, 20 November 2009
Unicycling Mount Victoria, visit 3
Ankle still sore after 6 days of resting it, but my ankle braces (SixSixOne Race Brace Pro) arrived today, so I decided to risk riding to work.
That went well enough, so after work I headed up to Mount Vic again. Up the usual route from Pirie Street, then over the top and round this loop on the south part of the hill, which I hadn't tried before.
I found the hill climbing quite tough today - lack of practice? The ankle braces, although they certainly prevent twisting and rolling pretty well, also restrict front-to-back flexing a little; that caused a few falls at first, as my feet kept losing contact with the pedals.
The new track was fun though, if rather hard work - lots of climbing to get back up from the velodrome.
That went well enough, so after work I headed up to Mount Vic again. Up the usual route from Pirie Street, then over the top and round this loop on the south part of the hill, which I hadn't tried before.
I found the hill climbing quite tough today - lack of practice? The ankle braces, although they certainly prevent twisting and rolling pretty well, also restrict front-to-back flexing a little; that caused a few falls at first, as my feet kept losing contact with the pedals.
The new track was fun though, if rather hard work - lots of climbing to get back up from the velodrome.
Thursday, 19 November 2009
Munisano's muni video
Munisano has a new video showing some fun-looking muni action - and the obligatory fail reel at the end!
I'm jealous because I'm still waiting for my ankle to recover so I can get out there myself. I was able to walk to work on it today, but it's still a bit sore and swollen. Maybe by the weekend...
I'm jealous because I'm still waiting for my ankle to recover so I can get out there myself. I was able to walk to work on it today, but it's still a bit sore and swollen. Maybe by the weekend...
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