fourwhitefeet

Obama’s conference at the House Republican Retreat today.

Video
Transcript

A few excerpts:

“Although that’s one of the points that I made earlier. I mean, we’ve got to be careful about what we say about each other sometimes, because it boxes us in in ways that makes it difficult for us to work together, because our constituents start believing us. They don’t know sometimes this is just politics what you guys — or folks on my side do sometimes.

“So just a tone of civility instead of slash and burn would be helpful. The problem we have sometimes is a media that responds only to slash-and-burn-style politics. …

“… I’ve just got to take this last question as an example of how it’s very hard to have the kind of bipartisan work that we’re going to do, because the whole question was structured as a talking point for running a campaign.

“That’s why I say if we’re going to frame these debates in ways that allow us to solve them, then we can’t start off by figuring out, A, who’s to blame; B, how can we make the American people afraid of the other side. And unfortunately, that’s how our politics works right now. …

“And so the question is, at what point can we have a serious conversation about Medicare and its long-term liability, or a serious question about — a serious conversation about Social Security, or a serious conversation about budget and debt in which we’re not simply trying to position ourselves politically. That’s what I’m committed to doing. We won’t agree all the time in getting it done, but I’m committed to doing it.”

His speech and comments reminded me of Stephen Colbert’s interview with Tom Brokaw a few weeks ago in which Brokaw said, “We can’t get through these profound challenges…if everything becomes a food fight.”

Good luck to Obama in convincing Congress to govern instead of spending their time in office planning their next campaign. It will probably only happen if their constituents demand it, and that is unlikely when so many of those constituents are forming their opinions based on polarized and polarizing media.

I finally added some PEAR packages to my MAMP Pro installation. Theoretically you should be able to use the PEAR installer that comes with MAMP. I’ve used the PEAR installer on other servers, but couldn’t get it to work on the local development environment on my Mac. I’ve found a few posts from MAMP users who recommend using the installer, but if any of those users got it to work on their own systems, they didn’t share the details of how they did it.

Success came by following a manual process similar to that copied from the Neo Geek article below, Setting up MAMP, PEAR, and Headress:

PEAR Installation

1. After locating the framework you want on pear.php.net, download the latest version (or the version you need for testing) from the "Download" tab on that framework's main page.
2. Unzip the downloaded file.
3. Open the folder that was extracted to find another similarly named folder and a file named package.xml.
4. Copy just the folder to Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/. (I copied just the contents of that folder to the HTML folder in my example below.)

Notes on Step 4: 1) If you are using MAMP Pro, you still install your pear packages in the MAMP path shown. 2) There is a PEAR folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ PEAR packages you add manually go in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ not in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/PEAR/

I didn't want to change include statements in the scripts I was testing. Instead I created a folder in Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/ for the top level package name, HTML in this case, and copied the files in the extracted package folder into the HTML folder. So for HTML_Common there is a file named Common.php in my Applications/MAMP/bin/php5/lib/php/HTML/ folder. If this path structure doesn't work for you, refer to the error messages PHP is generating to help you figure out where to locate packages.

Maybe the Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is just what the U.S. needs. For a moment individuals can stop arguing about global warming and gay marriage rights, and unite against pseudo-citizens; i.e. corporations.

Sign the motion “to amend our Constitution to: Firmly establish that money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights…”

Don’t open any e-mail messages or attachments that appear to be from Facebook regarding resetting your password. This trojan has been circulating since the end of October, but I just received a copy of the spoofed e-mail this morning.

More information –
Massive bot attack spoofs Facebook password messages

Ok, so it started out a little chilly…24deg F, but by the time we reached Hatch, NM, 24 miles into the Radium Springs 200k, my fingers had thawed. The 136 mile route is beautiful and at least 90 miles of it has very little traffic. It first travels west and north, with a very gradual climb. After an easy warm-up of about 50 miles, we headed into some hills; steep-ish, short-to-medium climbs….nothing too extreme. After Nutt was a fast 20 miles, east, back into Hatch. The last 20 miles, riding south into the wind were a bit of a grind, but more mentally, than physically difficult.

The New Mexico Brevet Series organizers and volunteers are awesome! The level of support was as good or better than any organized century I’ve ridden. At $25 per rider entry fee, I don’t see how they even cover their costs. Not only was there drop bag and sag wagon support, they provided sandwiches, fruit, brownies and soft drinks and home-cooked dinner afterwards.

Even though I’d ridden Tejas 500 eight weeks ago, I felt only minimally prepared for this ride. Seeing Radium Springs on my calendar three weeks out, I’d added a weekly long ride on the rollers of 3, 4 and finally 6 hours to get ready.

If you ride Radium Springs it’s probably a good idea to have a light that’s bright enough to comfortably ride with and a bright taillight, and a good amount of reflective material on your bike and clothing. Daylight is pretty short on December 6th, and the traffic between Hatch and Radium Springs really picked up late afternoon and evening. All the drivers gave me lots of room, but I’m sure they aren’t used to watching for cyclists that time of day/year.

Coming from the north, we stayed at Truth or Consequences, about an hour from the start rather than driving farther south to Las Cruces. That saved a little driving on Friday and Sunday. I hope to do more NM Brevets in the coming year!

the HRM trained group showed significantly greater increases in peak output (5.0% vs 3.5%)

Don’t get me wrong, I’d love to have a power meter. I just can’t justify spending $1500 or more on one. I’ve read that some very experienced riders would take an old bike with a power meter over a new bike without one, but I’m not convinced. I found this article from March, 2009 that supports that view, “Put Down That Power Meter, Eugene“.

If this is repeatable, I think there may be two reasons why the HRM group did better than the power meter group, one related to recovery, the other related to adaptation. My guess is that when a rider is not well recovered, a heart rate based target will account somewhat for that. In other words, a power-based target remains the same no matter how tired an athlete is, while one’s heart rate is likely to be affected by fatigue and naturally ratchet the effort level to lower power. I know that training at consistent power is something proponents of power meters site as an advantage, but it could be an obstacle to good recovery.

The second reason, and probably the more important of the two: Hopefully as one adapts to training, the power that can be maintained at a given heart rate increases. By training with a heart rate target, the power level will naturally adjust upward. If training with power, as one improves, the power target would remain the same, while the heart rate decreases. My intuition is that by training with an HRM one’s power level is always incrementally adjusting, whereas a power target would often not be adjusted for as long as 2-4 weeks, until the next test.

For those reasons, even before I saw this study, I questioned the supremacy of power meters for endurance training. Though I’d guess that power meters are far better for anaerobic training; when the rider is doing short, hard sprints where heart rate response lags behind effort. It’s unlikely that sprint training was even included in this study, since HRM’s give such poor feedback in that situation.

Ideally one would use both power and heart rate data, but this study indicates that at least for some aspects of cycling training, a heart rate monitor can be as good or better than a power meter.

The abuse of these infant calves is merciless. There is no excuse for skinning animals alive and shocking them time after time with electric prods when it’s obvious they are too weak to stand.

Veganism for me started when I was in Vermont stuck in road construction beside a veal lot. I didn’t become vegan overnight, but immediately reduced my intake of dairy products, including Ben & Jerry’s, whose headquarters ironically, was just a few miles down the road from that veal lot.

“Operations at Bushway Packing, Inc., a veal slaughterhouse in Vermont, have been shut down by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vislack, pending further investigation. The footage that an undercover investigator from the Humane Society of the United States obtained was truly shocking, showing calves only days-old being shocked and prodded, and live calves being left in piles of dead calves.” –VegNewsletter

I’d hoped I could read more about the shutdown of the slaughterhouse without seeing any photos. I couldn’t bring myself to click play on the video on the HSUS website. The still image is almost too horrifying to bear.

#3) When in doubt, wait: If you can’t allow the bike 3 feet of space, wait to pass until you can — just as you would for any other slow-moving vehicle.

From the Los Angeles Times, How to minimize accidents between autos and bicycles, by Christie Aschwanden. Six simple tips; short and sweet. #2 would have prevented my collision with a car, except that the 87 year-old driver apparently never saw me. I wish this information was more widely understood by drivers. Hmmm….maybe a few questions on state drivers’ tests?!

I would add -
Understand that when the wind is gusting 30mph (or even 10mph) a cyclist may have a hard time holding their line. In other words, a cyclist may be dealing with weather and road conditions that drivers are unaware of….thus the 3 foot MINIMUM.

Of all the massage gizmos in my possession, more than I wish to enumerate here, there are two (maybe three) I would buy again.

First is the Theracane. I got one just before Tejas 500 and I think it contributed to my finishing in good shape. I usually get neck and shoulder pain after a few hours of riding. At other races Jen has leaned an elbow into my trapezius (trapezii ?) periodically. At Tejas I left the Theracane hanging near my food table. Between laps I’d grab it, inflict a few seconds of torture to my neck, traps, and rhomboids, and return to riding with significant relief.

(Another note on this subject: I noticed after about 30 hours of riding that I got a lot of neck/shoulder relief by moving my arms way back on my aero bars, so my wrists were practically resting on the pads. In other words, I was too stretched out on my bike. Not saying this is always the case, but you might try moving closer or farther away if you’re having neck/shoulder pain.)

So why did I wait so long to get a Theracane? I’ve known about them for years. Well, I have a stick; like go in the forest and pick up a stick, that approximates the same functionality so I didn’t think I needed one. I can say now, that besides being more portable, the Theracane is capable of more precision and generally works better than a stick.

Speaking of sticks, the other thigamajig I’d buy again is the Original Body Stick. Unfortunately you can’t find these laying around in the forest. The Body Stick offers a kinder, gentler neck massage than the Theracane. Not to say it can’t hurt like H-E-2*L if you’re sore. The Body Stick is simple, and portable, and you can use it standing up, or sitting down to massage neck, back, arms and legs.

Which brings me to all those other whatchamadoozies. It’s not that I don’t use them. Well, the ones that require another person really don’t get used, but I do use the other self-massage doohitchies. The problem is, 85% of the time it’s either not convenient, or I just don’t feel like rolling around on the floor. While body weight inflicted torture is unique and works well for some areas; i.e. piriformis, the strength and contortion required usually make the floor models less relaxing.

So what’s number (maybe) three you ask? Don’t get too excited. It’s the Travel Stick. Nice if you need a shorter version to fit in a smaller suitcase, but generally the length is not as good as the Original, and mine has had a funny plastic smell for years that makes it less pleasant to use.

I’ve been looking forward to the changing seasons; the time of year when I spend more time riding indoors. I know many people hate riding in one place, but for me its a nice change of pace. After a few weeks of “taking it easy” with no pre-defined workouts, riding my rollers is a nice transition back into real training. They give me a break from cars and wind, a chance to watch some movies and catch up on Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, and the opportunity for longer, steady paced rides that are hard to do on mountain roads. Not to say I prefer my rollers to riding outdoors, but in Southern Colorado never too much time passes without some sunny, dry days.
 
Of course there will be snowshoeing and backcountry xc-skiing. Probably not much skate skiing, but there are groomed trails in New Mexico a couple hours drive from here. I may finally check those out. Or I could make a trip to Craftsbury for a skate ski intensive.
 
Mostly, I’m looking forward to a few months of little travel, lots of work, and hibernating at home on my rollers and local forest trails; putting as few miles on the Jetta as possible.