Just a few hours after posting that I broke my personal best bike-to-work speed, I also broke my personal best bike-to-home speed.  And by quite a bit.  Looking back at my previous blog posts on the topic, my previous best time from the office to our house was 32:51, set last year.  This afternoon, despite heinous traffic problems, I did it in 30:04.  That’s over a 10% improvement!

It’s funny, I posted something here last year bragging that I beat my records in both directions on the same day, and it was a Friday.  I guess it’s something about Fridays, but today is Friday and today I set records in both directions again.

Here’s the complete historical breakdown.

Best times biking from our house to the office

29:52 - October 2006 - on the Giant Revive

27:46 - June 27, 2007 - on the Trek homebrew hybrid

25:58 - July 18, 2007 - on the Trek Soho 1.0

Best times biking from the office to our house

36:13 - October 2006 - on the Giant Revive

32:51 - June 27, 2007 - on the Trek homebrew hybrid

30:04 - July 18, 2007 - on the Trek Soho 1.0

Looking at these numbers, can you guess which direction is mostly uphill and which is mostly downhill? 

Boy was I pooped when I got home this afternoon.  It was a hot day for a nearly non-stop uphill ride.

By the way, just in case you think I’m Superman or something, depending on the route I take, my bike commute is around 6.0 to 6.3 miles.  So despite all my bragging, I’m only averaging 12 mph or so.

Starbucks to shutter Broomfield, Longmont locations : Breaking News : Broomfield Enterprise

The cut-backs will include baristas at 12161 Sheridan Blvd., at the corner of 121st Street and Sheridan in Broomfield, and at the intersection of Highway 119 and Martin Street in Longmont, the company announced this week.

Damn, so now I’ll have to actually go across the street to the other Starbucks at that intersection to get my coffee?  This is the Starbucks that used to be Peaberry, just diagonally across the 120th & Sheridan intersection from another Starbucks.  When Peaberry went out of business, Starbucks moved in, putting coffee shops on 2 of the 4 corners.  So I’m not too upset that we’re down to only 1 Starbucks at that corner.

Did I mention that everyone in Broomfield should be patronizing Bananelope Coffee instead of Starbucks, anyhow?

This morning, I broke my personal best bike to work time.  Today was 25:58, which is 49 seconds better than my previous best of 26:47, set a couple months ago.  I had a bit of good stoplight karma and low traffic because I left the house at 7 AM.  Woot!

Did I mention how much I love my new bike?

I bought this series from iTunes last night for $3.99.  The first two episodes are out and they’re great!  Then, today, I read that they’re available for free!  Oh well, it’s worth four bucks for such hilarity, commercial free.

I encourage you to go check it out: “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog“

S&M Barbie is lashed by the public | The Sun |News

Personally, I think the new Barbie is hot!

My niece-in-law is a marketing genius on Mattel’s Barbie team.  I haven’t heard from her in a while, but I wonder what she thinks of this.

Since reading How to Live Well Without Owning a Car a few months ago, I made a serious effort to change my daily commuting habits.  I bought an awesome new bike, and I’m really liking it a lot.  Plus, my employer offers free bus passes to all employees, so I decided to get one of those.

The net result?  Since April 9, I have only driven a car to work 3 times.  That’s an average of less than once per month!

Most days lately, my routine is to ride my cool bike to the bus stop (1.3 miles), then catch the bus, then ride from the other bus stop to the office (0.3 miles).  And in the afternoon when I come home, I reverse it.  So my commute is free, and I get at least 3 miles of cycling in daily without even thinking about it.  All told, it takes me about 35 minutes from door-to-door.  Obviously, that’s more than the 15 minutes it takes when I drive or ride my motorcycle.  But 10 or 15 minutes of the commute is reading, so I’ve been able to read more books this summer than usual.

And those 3 times I drove our Dodge pickup to work?  One of those days was when I needed to carry home my space heater from the office, and it definitely wouldn’t fit in my backpack.  And one of those days was when I was leaving for Nebraska right after work, so that hardly counts.

Feeling virtuous?  You bet I am!

And I just tune out all the complaints about high gas prices.

At first I thought they were weird.  But now that I’ve lived with a pile of external drives for a while, and now that the Drobo supports FW800, I decided to get one.  It should arrive next week, and then I’ll consolidate all my external drives down to this thing and never have to worry about backups again.

Data Robotics, Inc.

I hope it’s as good as they say.  I’ll hopefully post an update in a couple months with how I’m liking it.

I woke up this morning to the sound of non-stop growling from my stomach.  It’s so bad that I couldn’t sleep through it any more.  The reason?  I haven’t had anything to eat for 36 hours now, in preparation for today’s gastrointestinal exams.  The last thing I ate was a piece of cherry pie, as dessert after supper Monday night.  Since then I’ve been on a “clear liquids” diet meaning I can drink juice, pop, tea, broth, etc. but not eat anything except jello.  And unfortunately, I haven’t really liked jello since I was a kid.

Lunch yesterday was a cup of hot vegetable broth, a Coke, and a bowl of lime jello.  Supper last night?  A cup of chicken broth and some pomegranate juice.  And then I drank a gallon - that’s right, literally one gallon - of this special liquid they prescribe to clear out the colon in anticipation of an exam.  I had to drink one cup of this stuff every ten minutes for about three hours straight.  So I spent the whole evening cycling between the toilet and the kitchen, putting more of this liquid in one end and eliminating it out the other end.  It was one of the least enjoyable things I think I’ve ever done.  But I did get lots of reading done in the bathroom!

Now, this morning, I’m having a glass of iced white grape juice for breakfast.  In another hour or two maybe I’ll have another cup of broth, but even the clear liquids have to cease at 10 AM and I’m not allowed to drink anything for the three hours before the exam.

After the exam, I’m having a milk shake, hamburger, and tater tots.  I don’t give a damn if that’s not a well balanced meal.  After 44 hours of nothing to eat, I think I’m allowed to eat whatever I want.

Wow, I had no idea there is both a VNC client and server built into Mac OS X 10.5.  I had installed separate apps (2 clients and 1 server) I downloaded over a year ago, but after reading these two articles I see I don’t need any special software at all!

http://www.macworld.com/article/131094/2007/12/screensharepower.html

http://www.dssw.co.uk/blog/2007/05/14/a-vnc-server-is-included-in-mac-os-x-104

I ran across this online ad today:

“What If I Could Show You How To Make up to $120 Dollars Per Hour Playing Video Games From Your Home… Would You Be Interested?”

That’s from this link: Video Game Tester Jobs - Gamer Testing Ground

It sounds like the perfect scam.  Young adults think that software testing in the games industry would be a great career.  What could be more fun than playing games all day to get paid for it?  But in reality, it’s one of the worst paid, least steady, most notoriously overworked parts of the field.

I volunteered to participate in a local middle school’s “Career Day” a few years back.  When I explained to the kids that I’m a software test engineer, they all - every single one of them, all day long - asked, “Cool, so you get to test game software?”  It was funny.  At the end of the day, I got a pretty good idea of the distorted view of the software industry inside the mind of a 13 year old boy.  It’s about 80% games, 10% operating systems, and 10% web browsers, I think.  They had a hard time understanding the idea that there’s software outside those areas.  Spreadsheets?  What’s that?  Operating system?  Huh?  And the idea that I help build software that makes it so the phone company can provide phone service was like saying we build the software they use to make blue cheese to turn blue.  (does not compute)

Anyhow, when I saw this ad I thought it sounds like the perfect scam for people who don’t really know anything about software testing or development or the industry.  Because there are tons out there who want to believe, I’m sure.

For a reality check, here’s an article from a writer who actually tried being a contract game software tester:

http://www.seattleweekly.com/2007-07-11/news/testing-video-games-can-t-possibly-be-harder-than-an-afternoon-with-xbox-right.php