Aaron Baer - Connect the Dots

Ilyse and Matt are visiting this weekend from San Francisco and a great weekend we’ve been having. So far the report from the weekend is.. Friday I kicked off work around 3:30 due to a slow day and things being under control as they are now. Holiday Weekend!!! Haircut and to the carwash before heading home made for a good start. Finished cleaning the house before bed and got a good night sleep. Ilyse and Matt were due in around 2pm on Saturday and since I knew it was going to be my only chance this weekend to ride I called Ivan from the sunny back porch Friday evening and organized a morning ride in Forest Park. Tim hit the big 26 that very day so not only were the trails absolutely perfect it was a celebratory birthday ride as well. A bit of a shorter ride than I’ve been getting in the past few weeks I put in about 14 or 15 miles before heading back to the house to get cleaned up for our guests… Tour is just around the corner and we’re all gearing up. It’s going to be great this year.

So our guests arrived intact and happy. Saturday even consisted of a couple of delicious pints at the Alameda Brew House and some great food too. And then Star Wars… Finally.. I’d have to say I wasn’t disappointed. I thought it was a good movie. I’m a little sad that I didn’t think it was a great movie. But if you drop I and II off the edge of the earth and just take this one and the first three the series is great. Anyhow, it made for quiet and enjoyable evening and the topper on what I would consider a great day. So great to have Matt and Ilyse in town.

So today is Sunday and it’s been another awesome day. We all got up for Sunday Yoga which just really keeps proving to be the only way to start a Sunday. Big class this time. Then we met up with Danielle and Ian and we all went to Violet’s Cafe for breakfast. Huge amounts of tastie food and good times. Here are a few images from the day. We headed home after that and Ian Matt and Myself took Nellie to the park to throw her Frisbee and our Frisbee and ended up spending a good three hours at the park. Eden and Ilyse joined us after a bit of a rest at the house and we all did summersaults and hand stands for a while. Life is only good with summersaults and hand stands in the park.

Now we’re all having a little downtime. Which is why I’m writing. I think I’ll go chill out a bit downstairs and rest up before heading to the store to get some things to cook on the grill tonight. Shit.. Life is good. I am one lucky human.

Sitting here live.. at the PTP monthly meeting.. Really enjoyable so far tonight.. I had to arrive early to meet with David Pool from New4Neighbors to do an interview for the up coming Presidential election. Very laid back very enjoyable. I have to come up with some more documentation to send to him so “note to self”. Right now Nigel is doing his greetings talk.. people are introducing themselves.. A great showing for how freakin’ sunny it is out tonight, around 25 people. Michael is leading the meeting tonight because Darrin is under the weather.

Today was busy at work. Mostly updated some documentation and entered some tickets on issues that came up as we went to production. And basically really really wanted to be on my bike all day.

More meeting stuff.. Up coming Play Day.. Tom is heading it up once again and it’s going to rock.. June 4th from noon to 4pm at the Urban Grind. If you want to learn about the network, more about the nodes, more about how to use wireless technologies.. Show up.. There will be help for any level of questions that you could possibly have. Also, Adopt a Node. Tom Rocks. This is a great way to become involved in the network. Basically, if you live near a location or you visit a particular node often it would be amazingly helpful to “Adopt” it and keep track of how things are going.

And a large conversation regarding how are we going to manage installing and supporting nodes in the future. In my opinion A. Johnson had the best quote of the day, “We’re an open source project.”

Home finally.. just about to go to bed.. did recycling, trash and laundry after a long day.

And then it’s the morning.. geeze I guess I’d better post this.

Another good riding weekend this time around. I rode both Saturday and Sunday for a total of around 47 miles. Pretty good. Keep this up and I’ll be in prime condition for tour this year. Which is only 4 weeks away!! And for gawds sakes this year I’ll be in wookie land for a week. That makes me want to weep with joy. There’s nothing like the weather, the trails, the wookie hunt that goes down in the Siskiyou National Forest in June. I truely can’t wait..

Anyway back to the rides from this weekend. Saturday morning I woke to what I knew was inevitable, a flat front tire. After a new tube and a couple of flats I knew there must be something coming through the side wall of the front tire I had been riding for over a year. So I changed the tube and put on another tire that I had from before, made some espresso, filled the camel back with a few snacks and water and hit the road. 9:55am. Hitting the city at that time of the morning on a Saturday and knowing that you’re going to be riding great trails soon is a fantastic feeling. After decending to the River and Climbing up to NW 21st I arrive on Darrin’s porch minutes before our intended rendezvous… it’s 10:20am.. What transpires over the next 2 hours is what makes this city one of the most amazing places on this big globe of ours. We climb.. Darrin leads since it’s his hood, but in the back of my head I know I have a surpise that I figure he’s not ready for. Suddenly I can’t figure out if I’m still in Portland or if we’ve been transported to Stepford. This is one clean freakin’ city.. neighborhood eutopias of beautiful houses and amazing parks. On the weekends there are people outside in all the parks, playing baseball, soccer, laying in the grass walking their dogs.. We’re lucky.. But this neighborhood.. it’s a trip.. the houses are incredible I was a little scared of how tranquil it really was up there. After taking in a great view point on Cornell I decided it was time to stop f’ing around and find some dirt. We headed back down with me in the lead and worked our way a few streets north to Thurman and head up again. At the top of Thurman where it meets Aspen there is a trail head to Forest Park. Specifically Leif Ericson trail, which I rode just the week before, and I drop it on Darrin.. “Just remember, we just rode off of your front porch Darrin.. ” We climb 5 beautiful miles into the 11 mile trail.. find a great view point overlooking the River and back over to North East Portland have a snack and shake out the arms. Then the true gratification of punishing your body climbing up. We turned around and dropped the 5 miles back to the trail head.. Sick trails.. I ask myself “Did I really ride out of my garage this morning and now I’m riding this?” Happy to know the answer is a resounding YES we continue to drop all the way back down to the water front. Catch a couple of ripping skate boarders shredding the upper stairs at the start of the East side esplinade and eat an orange.. Nice ride.. We split.. and I head back up to North Portland to the house… 23.8 miles down and back by 2.. LOVE this city. A few more rides like that and some egg beaters and Darrin will be kickin’ some ass on the trail.. (quit smoking cigs hommie )

OK, Good ride on Saturday but I’m in training right.. And I knew that there was no question about it.. Must ride on Sunday.. Yoga class was awesome. Sunday morning yoga with Eden is really the best way to start a Sunday.. and it felt great to stretch out the Forest Park ride. Back to our house after for waffles and fresh New Hampshire maple syrup with Danielle. Yum.

Got a couple of work things out of the way and ran a pipeline so that commissions accounting would have numbers to look at first thing Monday morning and clearing up the rest of the day and night for a ride and relaxation. I’m super happy that worked out.

Breaking sun off and on all day.. I called Tim around 2:20.. Ride at three sounds awesome. As I’m finishing up preperation for riding in the garage I hear a few bits of rain start to hit the roof.. So donning the outter shell I hit it.. Good thing too, by the time I get half way there I’m in a down pour. Drenched, I show up at Ivan’s. After some cordial “how do you do’s” we head off to Mt. Tabor to hunt Wilderberries! And do we ever. We ripped Mt. Tabor to pieces, we found a trail that we both had not before, which was exciting, and made a few harrowing ascents combined with some of the best Urban single track descents you can find anywhere. The trails were wet but pretty sticky on the up hills. Going down however made for some high speed mud slicks that were stomach to the throat fun and on the last decent we picked a line that seemed to be just about the longest downhill you can find on Mt. Tabor. Man it was fun. Both of agreed that we had just left our little volcano smoking and whimpering. Spliting from the base I kicked it back to North East Portland taking the high road (60th/57th) and then weaved my way back over to to home in North Portland.. Somewhere around 23.5 miles total round trip.

So I guess I got about 47 miles or so in this weekend. I like the sound of that. I feel like I’m riding really strong this season. I haven’t felt this comfortable on my bike in a number of years. I’m totally stoked for tour.. New tires and a few little tweaks here and there and I feel like Trek is going to do just fine in her vintage age…

“You can’t be lost if you don’t care where you are.”

Alright.. Friday.. I like the sound of that. I seriously need to get on the bike this weekend. Most likely riding with Darrin on Saturday Morning. Talked with Eden about it last night but need to confirm. Darrin.. I’ll say 98% chance I’ll be on your doorstep at 10:30am.

Well we finally released our Production systems into the world here at work. Definately earlier than last year.. Still not as smooth of a testing cycle as I’d really like to see. But gee you have to work with the resources you have available right? .. right..

Fixed up some oracle drivers that were giving us heart ache yesterday. Supporting the “customers” for the next couple of days as they start their processing in the Production environment and dreaming of Mt. Biking.

Also, I fixed up a few things on slyness.org this morning cleaning up some stuff that were causing errors in the logs that didn’t need to be there and trying to fight a bit of extra spam that seems to be coming through recently. If you use Plaxo I’m sorry. I just don’t trust services like that. A friend tried to updated their plaxo contacts last week and imediately after both Eden and I started getting the same type of spam along with a few other people that were in the plaxo contact list in question. I don’t know if spammers have found a way to mine the plaxo services and have automated it to build their spam lists or if it was just coincidence. But eweeww..

So I’ve also been fighting off a cold this week. I feel the worst in the mornings just as I’m getting up.. and today is the first day where my throat hasn’t had that scratchy, “oh shit you’re getting sick” feeling.. Though it’s still there a bit. Hopefully I’ve already kicked it. But we’ll see. Some good solid riding this weekend, continued rest and herb/tea/chemical coctails will keep it at bay.

Guess we’ll see how the rest of the day goes. Enjoy.

Last night Eden was meeting with FuseBox so I took the opportunity to get things back together at Stumptown Downtown after replacing the failed harddrive in the NuCab and rebuilding the Node.

Everything went smoothly with the exception of reconfiguring the original WAP54G that was there. That thing wouldn’t behave at all. So I left the WRT54G that they bought as filler when the system went down a few weeks ago and took the WAP home to work on there. Hopefully, I’ll recover the device and can drop it back in there before the Weekly on Wednesday. But the network lives again. Which is a good thing. Check out a few more shots from the location.

Today so far has just been work. Continued testing and moving processing into Production. It’s probably going to be a quiet afternoon. Definately worth lunch today though as I schooled Graeme in fooseball.

If I’m not mistaken I’m making dinner tonight for Eden and Meghan. A delish stir fry will be prepared. I’ll have to see if I can come up with something tastie to cook the chicken in. I’m getting pretty good at stir fry sauces. Until then more work here..

Stories to follow.. yes.. my seat broke off.. But this was a good riding weekend. I rode around 33 miles or so.. 23 on Saturday in Forest Park and 10 more on Sunday including Pier Park.

Everyone is going crazy.. Arbor Lodge Park is always a buzz with people, baseball, dogs, tennis, walking, riding, running.. Spring has sprung and people are lovin’ it outside. This weekend I went on a couple of rides trying to get ready for tour now just over a month away. I rode in Forest Park on Sunday and it was a good ride. I definately think I would have rode more that day if someone else was riding with me but I was able to scope out some good trails that will help build up some lung power and leg power. I’ll go ride there again this weekend probably both Saturday and Sunday.

Right now I’m enjoying a pint of home brew given to me by Sam. Tastie. Extreemly carbonated out of the bottle but it seems to have mellowed after pouring it into a fat pint glass and doesn’t taste overly carbonated when drinking. Thanks Sam.

Eden’s out teaching yoga and will probably be back in 20 minutes or so. I suppose I should start some dinner but I really really don’t feel like cooking tonight.

So lets see. I set up dns, including reverse dns, for my entire PTPnet subnet here Node134. Soon to be NodeSlyness. I can’t wait for it to get easier for us to join our networks together via openvpn.. slyness.ptp is ready to go. Keegan and Jimmy are definately kicking ass still on the infrustructure side. We need to get buick installed for the Mississippi Network and this week I’ll be ordering 5 Mark II’s which is going to be exciting and we’ll have some time to hack on them before we go and install them. Install on those is going to be sometime before my Mountain Biking trip on June 19th.

Also, people are going crazy with the new Netgear Wgt634u and roofnet and I think that is awesome. If we find that it’s useable (which I don’t fear) this is going to make the Mississippi Network kick much much ass..

Keep up the great work.

Must do some more Mentor work tonight and probably some of my own hackin’..