Monthly Archives: July 2003

It was a good ride!

Posted by chad on July 29, 2003 Comments Off

I completed the 25.5 mile loop in 1 hour 37 minutes 27 seconds, with an average speed of 15.5 mph and a top speed of 41 mph.

I forgot how great going that fast can feel. One may think that at 41 mph the bike would get all squirrelly underneath you, but for some reason it feels rather stable. You are aware that are going pretty fast, but don’t realize exactly how fast you are really going. I guess that’s because you need your complete attention on the road, otherwise you may find a pot hole or a rock which would dump you on your ass in no time. Which would be rather messy at that speed.

The loop has a bunch of rolling hills, but nothing too major. Which is good since I really need to get myself condition before I push the hard climbing.

Well I believe I’ve found a good ride to start off with. The plan is to ride again on Thursday. I just hope my butt can stand another 1 1/2 hours in the saddle.

Found a nice little loop…

Posted by chad on July 29, 2003 Comments Off

I just drove a nice little 25 mile loop which I will ride after work today. It starts right at Crystal Springs down Skyline Blvd and then on Canada Rd all the way into Woodside. Then up a small little loop into Woodside and back again.

I’ll let you know how if I endure the ride…

Need more training…

Posted by chad on July 29, 2003 Comments Off

This past Sunday I ventured over to Berkeley to take in a bike ride with a good friend of mine. Ben exclaimed it would be a relatively easy 25 mile loop. Well it may have been for him, but I hit the wall around the 22nd mile and was unable to climb the last 3 miles to the car. It’s a good thing Ben is in much better shape than I am. He made it up that last hill and back with the WRX in no time. I’m not sure if it was the climbing or him exercising the engine on way back down the hill. Either way my ass was lagging!

With that said, I had a great time. How could one not have fun when you catch 41 mph on a couple of the down hill stretches? I’ve got the itch to ride. But, I don’t want to keep Ben waiting for me on every climb of the ride. So today I’m going to map out a decent 20-30 mile loop down near work in San Mateo. And try to ride it twice a week.

Hero? Nahh…

Posted by chad on July 24, 2003 2 comments

I just got this message from John. It went out to a list of, ohh 70 people or so. Too funny!


Radiohead – My hero Chad West

Special People,

This past Sunday morning at 10:00am I was on my computer along with my roommates and other friends pressing refresh every 2 seconds on ticketmaster’s website, trying to get reserved seats for the radiohead concert in Sept.(at Shoreline, 1 mile from my house) that were just going on sale. I also was on the phone to Ticketmaster at the same time, even calling the VA number to ensure I could get through. Well….I got through and at 10:00am and 5 seconds all of the reserved seats were sold out. Needless to say I was pretty upset. I then went to try to get tickets at waste.uk.com, radiohead’s fan club website which always gets a premium allotment of reserved seats for Radiohead’s fans which went on sale the next day. Pressing refresh every 5 seconds as soon as they went on sale and yes,…once again…sold out before I could get through.

Then, this morning at 6:30 am I get a call on my cell phone. At first I thought it was a telemarketer or someone on the east coast telling me either really bad or really good news. There on the other end was my good friend, Chad West, telling me that Waste.uk.com had just released another, non-announced allotment of radiohead reserved seats on their website (face value of course)! As it was so early, none of the west coast fans had heard the news so I woke up my roommates and by 6:45 we had snatched up 20 reserved seats for the show! (as you can only order 4 per person/per address, we had them sent to our work adressess and Joe Hilger bought some for me back east! (Thanks Joe!)

So in summary, the old saying “early to bed, early to rise” really paid off for my new hero, Chad West, and for that I owe him forever. For the rest of you non-motivated radiohead fans, we’ll have some extra tickets. BUT, you’ll have to convince me of your love for the band cause here is what the going rates are on the free market!

Radiohead Ticket Search

CHANCO

Being an insomniac pays off!

Posted by chad on July 24, 2003 Comments Off

Well I woke up this morning around 4am and couldn’t sleep. So what do I do? Get on my computer and start messing around with my linux configuration.

Around 6am I got a message from W.A.S.T.E, which is sort of a portal for all things Radiohead. The message stated that my tickets to the San Diego show are actually for September 28th and not the 27th as their site stated. They were letting me know about this error, and giving me a chance to cancel the order if I am unable to make the show. Of course, being the huge Radiohead fan that I am, I was already aware of this.

But, this did make me think about others who may have given up their tickets. So I checked the site to see if any more were available. When I hit the site I noticed that not only were there more tickets for the San Diego show, but they had a new allotment of reserved tickets for the Shoreline performance earlier that week. Of course I instantly bought 4 tickets to the show and then phoned my buddy John to tell him to get his butt out of bed and buy tickets!

I can’t wait to find out where these seats are…

Lazy or Apathetic?

Posted by chad on July 21, 2003 3 comments

It’s bad either way you look at it!

Here are some questions I have been asking myself over and over again in the past couple of weeks:

  1. Why do so many engineers refuse to write up bug reports?
  2. How can an engineer develop software with out actually understanding the system?
  3. How can someone be okay with a failing system?

I promise to expand on this soon, but am in the midst of setting up my linux box.

Brokeback…

Posted by chad on July 8, 2003 Comments Off

I just got back from a killer show at Slims. If you are lucky enough to have Brokeback come though your town, you need to go! This group is headed by Douglas McCombs, who’s also the bassist for Tortoise and Pullman. This is typical for bands on the Thrill Jockey label, each member tends to have 3 or 4 projects which they work on. Anyway, rush out and get their latest album, Looks at the Bird. You won’t be sorry!

UI Hell…

Posted by chad on July 2, 2003 Comments Off

Well I’m in the process of writing Struts actions, which to me is a pretty boring part of development. We have a UI developer on our team, which is a big plus, but I still have to make sure the data she needs is in the resulting XML. It’s so tedious…

At least I was smart enough to grab Thievery Corporation’s, The Richest Man in Babylon this morning. The smooth groves are keeping me pretty mellow…