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/.

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.

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..

Yesterday, I took the morning off from work to get a bike fitting at 55Nine Performance. For a little over 2 hours, Eddie took skeletal measurements and bike measurements, adjusted things on my bike, looked at my posture and pedal stroke, and gave me a lot of advice on things I could do to improve my technique to get faster and experience less fatigue on body parts that shouldn't be working as hard as they were. My seatpost is higher, the cleats on my shoes are closer to my heel, there are new insoles in my shoes, my handlebar is closer to my seat (with a shorter stem), and I have a list of things to pay attention to when riding including heel position in the top of my pedal stroke, shoulder and elbow tension, and lower back muscles.

Some people think that bike fitting is a silly and expensive thing to do, but this fit will help me get the perfect bike for my next bike (more on this later), and should make me faster and hurt less. Given the amount of riding that I do and how much equipment I have, it's almost a no-brainer to do. As soon as I got home I adjusted seatpost height and seat position on the 3 other bikes and adjusted the cleats my other 2 pairs of shoes, and later in the day, Roger and I went to Conyers so I could see how things felt and record some video.

The difference was noticeable: less upper body fatigue and some different muscles getting used to push the pedals. Also, due to the shorter distance from seat to handlebars, I felt like I was able to corner a lot better and faster. Cool! My feet are going to take a little while to get used to the way weight is distributed on them now, but everything else felt very natural and I'm looking forward to do a run of all the loops at Blankets Creek and see how much faster it's made me. I also recorded video of both sides at Conyers and edited them down to be a bit more manageable than usual:

Conyers - The Easy Side from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Conyers - The Hard Side from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Some people I know started off this year doing "project 365" which has participants taking one photograph every day and sharing it with the world. One friend set up photo365.org for a handful of people doing this using Flickr. Some time on January 1st, I decided to participate and have been uploading my imaged to my 2009/365 album in my Gallery, and it's taken me 3 months to finally get around to writing the ~50 lines of PHP to make an RSS feed available for mine. So here it is, subscribe to ckdake.com/365.xml in your browser and enjoy!

Now I just need to figure out what to take a photo of for today...

Here's another bike video post, and I have most of the generes covered now so the rate at which these are produced should slow down a bit. First is an 11 minute video from the third round of the Snake Creek Gap Time Trial Series. You can read more about the series here. I missed the second race due to work travel, and for the third one I didn't improve my time much (just a minute or so) because I started too strongly on Adrian's tail, stopped a few times to tinker with the camera, and got leg cramps 200 feet from the top of the last uphill which was a new experience for me. Here's the video:

2009 Snake Creek Gap Time Trial #3 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

A few days later I went to the velodrome with Gregory and David to do my first round of training there for the season, and put together a brief teaser video for that:

Track Season 2009 from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

Wednesday night was the first of the season for Aaron's Cycling's Wednesday night ride which was very fast (though I somehow avoided getting dropped), and tonight was FM:Race's first weekly Thursday night ride. It's been a very fast paced week on bikes and I'm beat, so it's a good thing that I'm not riding tomorrow. The training plan probably needs some adjustments, as trying to race both track and mountain bikes this year is going to be quite a mess.