It's halfway through both mountain and track racing season, and things continue to work out as well as I could expect for trying to race two full seasons at the same time! All the details are here but the short version is I'm in 5th place out of 41 people in the XC-3/19-29 category in the Georgia Championship Series, and I continue to slowly move up through the rankings in the Cs at the track each time I race. Maybe I'll be 3rd in GSC by the end of the season and in the top 5 in the Cs?

As an accidental season mid-point, last night I went to a great event put on by Ergon at Sweetwater. I'd planned to enjoy a free beer or two and watch Seth run Goldsprints but Namrita (who organized the event) basically told me I had to participate, so I did, and it was a blast! Goldsprints are 200m time trials on fixed gear bikes on rollers, with software on a laptop figuring out who is quicker. I won my first 2 rounds and got eliminated in the semifinals by the guy that ended up winning the finals in his next round, which was not bad against a bunch of really fast people like Eddie O (won solo FM.24.08), Travis Turner (won the pro category at The Snake this year), and plenty of others. I'm not sure if my place was official 3rd or 4th, but it got me a $20 REI giftcard, a pair of Ergon GR2 Grips, and some very sore leg muscles that have been noticeable all day today! Here's a video of Eddie and Marc Hirsch in round-2:

Ergon Goldsprints from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

This was my first time doing goldsprints, and I think it's something I might need to do again, and perhaps next time I'll wear something other than sandals. The new grips will be going on my new mountain bike when it shows up, and I'll report back how well they work with the rest of things.

This past Monday, Seth and I headed to California for the week to get some work done. We didn't have hotel reservations that we knew of, and had a mess of things to clean up in the datacenter, so we drove the rental car straight from the airport to the office at around 11am on Monday and got started.

Monday

We spent Monday in the office, getting some face time with the new office IT guy ("chicks" is his username which is the source of much hilarity) and meeting with some people that we have ongoing projects with. Lunch was at Dittmer's Gourmet Meats and dinner was 4x4s at In-N-Out. We ended up crashing at Jesse's house after sitting in his hottub drinking Micky's, and watching Apocalypse Briggs (part 1 here, additional parts in "related videos"). It's nice sharing rooms with Seth because he likes sleeping on the floor which means no complicated figuring out beds/couches/etc. A pillow and a blanket, and he's set!

Tuesday

Pretty early on Tuesday, we headed directly to the datacenter, stopping at Le Boulanger on the way for tasty breakfast sandwiches. After getting our hands added to the biometrics system, we began sorting spare parts, getting rid of trash and server packaging, and removing wires that weren't plugged in to anything. 2 people from Virident Systems showed up with a box for us to install that we're doing some experimenting with, and things are looking pretty good so far with that. They took us out to eat at a Malaysian place that was pretty good, and our afternoon in the datacenter was more cleaning up. We drove to Thee Parkside in the city for beer and $2 tacos with some of the Gallery crew, and headed over to Digg with Robert for a few more beers. Afterwards, Seth and I drove Bharat back home and slept at his brand new house in Menlo Park. Digg HQ:

Wednesday

We started off Wednesday morning dropping Bharat off at work at Google, and getting a quick tour of Google HQ for Seth. After that was another datacenter day, interrupted with a trip to the office for some Japanese food for lunch. The grand total of trash we cleaned up filled up a 48 gallon plastic bin, and we began fixing labels on machines, noting rack locations in our ZenOSS installation, and properly labeling all the outlets on our PDUs and what they are connected to. Aside from everything looking a _lot_ better, highlights of the day included finding a machine we didn't know about with 32G of RAM (now a OpenVZ box doing a lot of things). For the evening we headed up to Lila's place in the hills of Los Gatos where the SugarCRM IT crew enjoyed beers and pork ribs, and Seth and I slept in a spare room there after staying up long past the always amazing sunsets:

Thursday

After the crazy drive back down from Lila's, we headed to the datacenter for the morning. It took us about 4 hours to finish things up including rewiring all the cat5 in one rack and mostly wiring up a new rack of machines (still waiting on the switch and PDUs before that will be done). Back at the office, we had a very late lunch of more 4x4s at In-N-Out because they apparently couldn't make us 5x5s. I spent the rest of the afternoon catching up on some of the ticket backlog assigned to me since we'd been busy all week doing other things, and around 6:30 we drove up to Igor's place and got to see "mini beast", Igor's newborn. Several other SugarCRM people met up with us to head to Whiskey Thieves for some whiskey sampling. At some point, Julian and I put a few dollars into the Area51 machine there and ended up with 5th and 6th place on the high score list, and he told us "The Japanese Fan Story" which you should get him to share if you haven't heard it yet. Afterwards, we stopped by The Owl Tree and ended up at Cocobang for some super spicy Korean BBQ chicken to finish off the week. A week's work:

Friday

Friday morning was back to the airport to fly home. It was another crazy exhausting week in California and while we got a lot done, I'm definitely glad to be home. Delta helped us out because both our flight our and our flight back took ~45 minutes less than expected. All meals not described above were either not eaten, or consisted of cherry coke and taquitos from 711. Now that I'm home, it's time to hunt down some people to pay their hosting bills (Eldon- While biking today I saw you on your bike so I know you are alive!) and mow the grass. Pictures from the week are at http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/june-california/.

A long time ago I signed up for Pulse for managing cashflow for ithought. It was kindof neat, but wasn't much of anything that I couldn't just do in a spreadsheet, so I pretty mugh forgot about it. This past Tuesday, they emailed me to let me know about a new version with lots of fancy graphs, and (as you may know) I'm a sucker for fancy graphs, so I loaded all of my cashflow information back in and signed up for the paid version which gives me a 30 day free trial to play with all the extra features.

the bottom of the bar graph bars is at the 0 line on the scale for the blue line which represents cash on hand. Anything below the bars is negative cash on hand.

The new graphing functionality is pretty nice. For any time range, it's possibile to get pie charts for showing breakdown by category of income and expenses. It's also possible to show a "cash on hand" graph over a time range that presents cash on hand every month, as well as income and expense totals for the month. It sure beats using the spreadsheet I have (though it will export your data into a csv file) , but is it worth the $9/month or more?

Unfortunately, my list of negative things is longer than my positive ones:

• It would be nice if cash flow view had net in/out row in addition to cash on hand, perhaps color coded? As it is, I have to manually compare this months cash on hand to last months cash on hand, using raw data from a report or the cash flow page. I'd think that net gain/loss for the month would be prominently displayed.
• It's goofy that "add expense" has a - icon next to it. I associate that icon with deleting something, and have never seen it used this way.
• It's a little pricy. For a business that doesn't 'make' any money (I try and break even on income/expenses), $108 for a year of graphs that I could really make in Open Office is a little steep, and the free version is crippled witout any reporting functionality at all. Not even a basic graph with a non-customizeable timeline?
• The user interface isn't as snappy as other web based applications.
• The way that companies are organized is kind of weird for an organization like mine. Perhaps someone familiar with Basecamp (which Pulse imports from) can enlighten me on the "Right Way" to do this, but It seems like I'd have to create separate "projects" for each of my hosting clients to get that to show up, and each "project" would only have one income entry.
• While I know that modeling future revenue is hard, I know when I'm going to invoice people, but I want to keep all their payments under one income entry. Pulse only allows entire income entries to be marked as active or inactive, and there is no way to mark individual transactions as inactive while leaving old ones as active. This effectively prevents me from being able to use Pulse to see what my numbers will look like 6 months from now.

All that said, I do like Pulse, but it's been a long time since their last update and I don't know what the timeline for future updates is. This is a service I'd pay for if it let me do everything I needed, and adding a tiny bit of basic client management (just names and contact info) and basic invoice management (just reminders to send invoices for $X on a certain day and reminders to follow up on people that haven't paid) would make this worth significantly more to me.

The graphs are great, and gave me some insights about my business that I somewhat knew but had never seen visualized on my cashflow data. Pulse helped me realize that since January 2006:

• Getting new clients is a slow but steady process, but revenue slowly rises from one several-month-span to the next.
• 40% of my income comes from yearly web hosting, and my monthly hosting customers, advertising revenue, fastermustache related things, and web design projects bring in higher percentages than expected.
• ithought was cash negative after the initial outlay for first server for a year, but then started climbing. These days, I typically build cash reserves before most purchases that fully cover them. The last major purchase was an exception, but should last for some time and pay for itself over less than 2 years. You can see the sudden drop into negative cash-on-hand in the graph above.
• As of May 2009, I'm cash positive $88.41 since Jan 1 2006 in this venture, so my "I spend all the money I make on hardware upgrades and services" still holds true. This year looks like it's going to be a fantastic year of growth for ithought so there should be some very cool hardware on the way before this time next year!

Perhaps Pulse will keep improving over the next few months (like mint.com has), or perhaps it will be years before the next update. I'll keep using it for a month or two and see if the graphs are worth it as revenue comes in and I can see them change, but I could always just spend a weekend with a spreadsheet tool and come up with my own system. Getting the issues above addressed will be key to keeping me on as a paying customer!

It's Bike Month this month in the United States and that means all kinds of crazy bike related things are going on. However, for someone with no commute (working from home) that rides a whole lot, there just isn't that much to change. However, I've been having some issues with shifting on my road bike and while looking at my ride log I realized that I've had it exactly one year, have put 3189.6 miles on it, and the only drivetrain maintenance (aside from replacing the shifters after a wreck) I've done was replacing the chain at 2000 miles. This combined with a super sweet donation of ~20 cleaning wipes that Tim from Grease Monkey Wipes sent over to FM:Race, meant that I would celebrate bike month by actually doing a detailed clean of my drive train. It's not a terribly exciting story, but the pictures are fun:

Parts come off (and not just sort of off, all the way off)

Hands get dirty

Things finally are clean again (the front too)

This was a somewhat long process with part removing, degreasing, rinsing, scrubbing, more degreasing, reinstalling, greasing, and my hands had to be cleaned several times throughout the process. I used a Grease Monkey Wipe on the big chainring on the front the first time around, but it started out pretty dirty and before all the grease was removed, the wipe was pretty much all used up. Much more successfully, I used a fresh one on my hands at one point and it got them from relatively dirty to pretty clean. The wipes held up admirably and did a pretty good job getting grease off, and are perfect for carrying around in a saddle bag, but if you're going to be getting seriously greasy you'll need slightly tougher ammunition. I know people that keep rubber gloves with their bike tools and in their bike bags, but I seem to have less than my share of mechanicals so I only get greasy working at home and Fast Orange does an amazing job getting rid of crazy amounts of grease. I bought that container a few years ago and have barely put a dent in it. Both Fast Orange and Grease Monkey Wipes use all natural solvents, both leave your hands smelling citrus fresh, and form a great pair for degreasing your hands in all situations.

I manage a few Drupal sites, and have worked out two simple systems for making upgrades as painless as possible, one using diff and patch, the other using subversion. The two examples I'll use here don't really have customized code outside of .htaccess files and things in the sites/ folder, so these processes may require some tinkering if you've done core level customization. Hopefully these will be helpful to someone new to working with updating PHP applications, and if you're running any PHP applications you need to stay on top of security updates to protect your site and your user's information! Upgrading both of these sites today took me less than 10 minutes to do, but if you're attempting your first upgrade, you should understand what is going on and maybe even read through the whole Introduction to upgrading Drupal guide. I definitely leave out some of the recommended steps.

ckdake.com - no revision control

This site (ckdake.com) is just my personal things and could be restored from backup pretty easily without too much trouble, and I'm the main user so it's not a big deal if it's down for a few hours. Drupal 6.12 came out and here's what I did to upgrade:

cd /var/www/ckdake.com/
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.12.tar.gz
tar -zxf drupal-6.12.tar.gz 
diff -uF^f -r htdocs drupal-6.12 > upgrade.patch
vim upgrade.patch
patch -p0 --dry-run < upgrade.patch 
patch -p0 < upgrade.patch

And that's it! In vim, I removed patch entries that did things I didn't want (like overwriting custom things I have in my .htaccess file), and I also looked at the output of the dry run of patch to make sure it looked right. After doing those things I visited ckdake.com/update.php and walked through Drupal's update wizard (which didn't make any changes this go around). Perhaps I should have done a mysqldump to backup my database first, but I have nightly backups of the database and in several years of upgrading Drupal this way have never had a problem updating minor versions this way. There was no downtime for my site since this all worked right (as it usually does) but I've broken things before. And keep in mind, a 5.x to 6.x upgrade is not going to be this easy...

fastermustache.org - revision control

fastermustache.org is used by a lot more people and I try to avoid any downtime there, so this process is a bit more involved and lets me roll back changes a lot more easily. Here's the sequence for that:

cd /var/www/test.fastermustache.org/
mv htdocs drupal-6.12
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-6.12.tar.gz
tar -zxf drupal-6.12.tar.gz
mv drupal-6.12 htdocs
cd htdocs
svn st

I now have a list of all changes for this release, and go through resolving things as needed. `svn st | grep "?"` gives me a list of files that need to be added, and I grep on other svn status codes to verify other changes. Once everything looks good, I update the live site:

svn commit -m "drupal-6.12 upgrade"
cd /var/www/fastermustache.org/htdocs
svn up

And then visit fastermustache.org/update.php to do any database changes required. This process also works for module updating:

cd /var/www/test.fastermustache.org/htdocs/sites/default/modules/
wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/date-6.x-2.2.tar.gz
tar -zxf date-6.x-2.2.tar.gz
rm date-6.x-2.2.tar.gz
svn st
# resolve all the issues as described above
svn commit -m "date-6.x-2.2 upgrade"
cd /var/www/fastermustache.org/htdocs/sites/default/modules/
svn up

And then one more visit to fastermustache.org/update.php and any needed database changes are made. Again, it would be a really good idea to do mysql database backups before running `svn up` on the live site, but I trust Drupal to treat me well for these sorts of updates. Perhaps once something breaks horribly, I'll post some steps on how to recover from problems.

Mountain bike racing season slowed down for a bit, my next mtb race is a month away, and track racing has picked up steam. What would have been my first night racing with the Cs got rained out, so my first races with non-beginners ended up being part of the Pro Racing Series at the Dick Lane Velodrome. I showed up Friday afternoon, warmed up, and did the best 200 meter time trial I've ever done to qualify for the sprint tournament. It took me 13.03s and I hit 37.01 mph which was a new top speed for me by several mph, but that only got me 17th of 29 people which meant I wouldn't be doing any match sprints with pros, which was fine with me! I had 3 or 4 races against a lot of very fast people, and managed to stay with the pack every time. It was a lot of fun, and significantly more fun than the beginner racing I'd been doing.

Saturday was "The Kerin" and in hindsight, I really should have raced. Even though it was a very fast crowd, people I did 200m faster than the night before were doing well in races, and I'll definitely be riding in the next pro series event on July 11th. As usual, when not riding, I took a lot of pictures. Here's Dave Worth from Knoxville, TN speeding by:

Dave ended up sleeping on my couch and we went on a road ride Sunday morning after perhaps a few too many beers Saturday night. I also tried out two new video camera things this go around. First, I strapped the camera to the back of the motorcycle used in the Keirin races. It turned out alright, but one of these videos will definitely be enough due to the consistent perspective:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - The Keirin from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

The second new thing was strapping my camera to Greggory and making him try and keep up with the pros in a 20 lap points race. He did an awesome job both keeping up and getting great footage, and it was nice to not have to be the one trying to keep up for once:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - Mens A 20 Lap Scratch from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

With some racing-with-pros experience under my belt, my first Wednesday race with the Cs was a whole lot of fun. The results only tell part of the story, but do show that Tyler Grohovec is a Cat-1 road racer just moving through the Cs and Bs to the As! Ability levels in the Cs were a bit spread out so at times it was tough to work together to break away, and I couldn't quite keep up with Tyler, but the highlight of the evening for me was getting 3rd in the scratch race which got me in to the Wheelrace final. This meant I was in a race with s3 other Cs, 4 Bs, and 4 As: we started at intervals around the track designed to have us all cross the finish line at the same time after 5 laps. My 48x16 gear ended up being a poor choice as I spun out a little bit and (like all the other races) couldn't stick on Tyler and Chris's wheels, but I held my own and Emile Abraham (who won the pro racing event last Saturday) didn't pass me until the last 10 meters of the last lap. Having that kind of competition was great, he commented afterwards that he was going all out and had a hard time catching up, and 5 minutes later I was off into the Cs 20 lap scratch race where I only got 6th. Lots of fun, and I'll definitely keep coming back on Wendesdays as this has the potential to be a lot more fun than CX mountain bike racing. And maybe I'll put a stiffer gear on my track bike before then..

It's been a month since the last round of update here, and my summer of bike racing has bike racing and riding taking up most of my time outside of work and sleep. Since SERC#3 at Tsali, I've raced mountain bikes at Flat Rock Park and Ft. Yargo. Even though I seem to keep getting 12th place, if I consistently show up at all the GSC races I've got a chance at the podium as I'm 5th of 34 overall in my category so far, and I've put together results and my race schedule on my ride bikes page. My friend David from undergrad at Georgia Tech stopped by and raced in a mountain bike race, but not before we drove to Athens to watch the 2009 Athens Twilight Criterium. I took a bunch of pictures and a few turned out pretty good like:

While not racing mountain bikes, there's been a lot of other riding both in the mountains and around town. I have a few pictures from a few rides, and there has been lots of undocumented road riding with FM:Race. Our weekly ride now has an official route that we're pretty consistent with, and Jim (training for an ironman triathalon this year) and I have been squeezing in longer rides on the weekend including and 85 mile one this morning that combined parts of the west side PATH and Silk Sheets:

View Larger Map

Then there's also been racing at the Dick Lane Velodrome where after 4 weeks racing on Tuesdays with other beginners, I'm first out of 28 people and moving up to the Cs on wednesday. All my track results are on my ride bikes page as well. Lastly, I'm building a new hard tail mountain bike. Details on that are still a little on the top secret side, but I do have a few photos of some parts that are already here. Hopefully the frame will be here in a few weeks and I'll be able to start putting things together

I've also been up to some pretty neat things at work, and will hopefully have a technical post here agin soon so it's not all bikes all the time!

This past weekend I was part of the Faster Mustache Race Team's contingent to #3 of the South-Eastern Regional Championship series. We drove up Saturday morning, set up camp, and pre-rode the full race course:

I'd ridden at Tsali before, but only on the Western half, and while similar, the Eastern side seems to cover a lot more distance. 18.6 miles later, we had a good idea of what we were in store for on Sunday, but for some reason Adrian and I kept on riding and did a loop on Thompson Loop:

This added in another 7.7 miles for the day and the 26.3 miles at 9.3mph turned out to be a bit much for a pre-ride. I downed my OJ+Protein recovery drink (quite foul tasting) and some PowerBar Recovery (delicious!) and we drove back to the campsite. The 20 or so of us were quite the crowd with mtb racers, little kids, and dogs running around everywhere, but there was plenty of food and everyone seemed to have a blast. I squeezed a ~30 minute nap in and felt a lot better, and we all sat around the fire passing around a guitar and making smores as the sun went down.

I rolled out pretty early Sunday morning to catch my 9:30am start time (Most people didn't start until 11:30), and rode my race. The first mile or two felt great, but on the first big climb the mileage from Saturday quickly caught up with me. I was 5.5% faster during the race than on the pre-ride and my heart rate was up from 159 to 166, so I was working harder and going faster, but not as fast as I could have been without the Saturday riding. Official results aren't up yet, but I know I stayed in front of at least 2 other people in my category and passed at least 2 people. Here's a map with all 3 loops from the weekend on it:

After a little cooling off, I set out to take photos, not just of Faster Mustache (Faster Mustache SERC#3 photos), but of everyone in the yellow wave. Hopefully some people will want to buy some of these SERC#3 Photos this go around. Below is Eric and Alex at the start of their single speed category, which they won 1st and 3rd place in:

And a closing shot of FM:Race's temporary world headquarters next to the start line, where we waited on everyone to finish up and for awards to be given out:

I had a pretty good time, but it's definitely a lot of trouble "just" for an hour long race. Plenty more races to go this summer, and in theory my first race at the velodrome will be tomorrow evening.