San's last day at work was last Friday (She's fulltime freelance illustrator now, let her know if you need something illustrated!), President's day was a company holiday for me, and I owed my friend David a trip to Charleston because he is stationed there with the USAF and has stopped by Atlanta a few times, so I put in for PTO for Tuesday and San and I took a long weekend and drove to the coast.

It was a pretty relaxing weekend of not doing a whole lot other than eating (starting with some midnight Taco Bell on Saturday shortly after we got there) and some light tourism. San, Dave, and I spent a little bit of time exploring and taking photos on a couple of occasions; My friend Campbell from High School joined us for walking around downtown Charleston and a few meals and movies; And Lindsey joined us to go to Joint Base Charleston to see where David works and get a personal tour of a C-17.

All the good photos from the weekend are here, and here's a small selection:

Another year, another Gallery Developers Conference. Chad (The lead Gallery UX guy) took care of organizing things this year, so we ended up in his current hometown: Santa Fe, NM. I took off the Thursday and Friday from work, but figured I might as well make a bigger trip of it so I took off the whole week and flew out last Saturday so I could squeeze in 4 full days of mountain biking before Gallery work began. I spent the first few days staying with Chad and biking on trails around Santa Fe on a sweet rental mountain bike from Mellow Velo: a Commencal Skin 2. All the photos are at: http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/santafe-mtb/ and some highlights are below. Chad was kind enough to let me stay at his house, and his fridge was always full of beer!

Sunday - 21.7 miles, 4:25, 4427ft

Not knowing what I was getting myself into, Chad dropped me off at a parking lot at St. John's College, and I headed up Atalaya Mountain. I don't think the base altitude slowed me down that much, but the climbing was pretty nuts and I did quite a bit of hike-a-bike. Near the top, there were places I had to carry the bike on my shoulder because it wasn't even really possible to push it up hill. It took a while to get up, but the view was worth it. I cruised on past the top and headed north into Dale Ball South, which I now know is the "expert" part of Dale Ball, and I now know the longest and steepest way to the top of Dale Ball South. Another great view:

and all things considered, my first day of mountain biking was pretty crazy and pretty successful. My GPS showed me the way back to Chad's house, and the elevation profile shows the cumulative ridiculousness:

This is the most climbing I've ever done in one day on a mountain bike, and more than I've ever done in one day on a road bike since I started keeping track a few years ago!

Monday - 29.1 miles, 3:37, 2810 ft

On day 2, I biked from Chad's house to Mellow Velo for a new rear tire and rode from there to Dale Ball Central. Central was a lot more rideable and fun than South, and Dale Ball North turned out to be the most fun. Nothing super epic about the day, but lots of good riding on fun trails and almost no walking the bike.

Tuesday - 33.1 miles, 2:52, 2875 ft

Sunday's ride finally caught up to me on Tuesday, so I took it a bit easy and biked south of town on the Santa Fe Rail Trail which is a relatively flat dirt bike path following an old rail line south of town. It was pretty overcast for the whole ride, and was a relaxing change of pace from Sunday and Monday, so I obviously had to do something a little crazy on Wednesday.

Wednesday - 35.1 miles, 4:33, 3932 ft

I piled into the car with Chad and he took a big detour on his commute to drop me off at the Aspen Vista trailhead up near the Santa Fe Ski Resort. Even with arm warmers and leg warmers on, it will still pretty chilly as I started up the service road climb to the top. For over 5 miles, the grade was a steady 6.5% and it took a while to make it to the top, but the views were even more worth it than Atalaya and Dale Ball South, and the whole way up was rideable! After some photos, I continued past the antenna cluster at the top of the ski resort and climbed another few hundred feet to the top of Deception Peak at 12,357 (which did require a little walking):

This is the highest altitude that I've ever been on a bike at. Originally, I was going to try and make it up to Lake Peak which is a little higher, but after some reading around online the night before it didn't sound too bikeable and I took a picture of Lake Peak from the top of Deception Peak to show how crazy getting to the top of it would have been:

I turned around and went back down the way I came (going down a whole lot faster than I came up!), and at the parking lot, turned up the road to the Windsor trailhead. Windsor turned out to be the most fun mountain biking of the trip: 5 miles of super fast downhill that was just easy enough to be rideable on a hard tail. I took a left on Chamisa for a few miles, headed through Dale Ball Central again, and rode back along the railroad tracks to Chad's house. Wednesday was a great day, the longest time I've spent on a mountain bike, and perhaps the most enjoyable day of mountain biking I've had. The elevation for the day shows a bit of the story:

In Summary

I'm very glad I decided to get some mountain biking in, and managed to climb over 14,000ft over 119 miles which is plenty of riding for a week. This trip meets my goal for 2009 of taking a week long mountain biking trip somewhere, and the 15h26min in the saddle is even enough to meet my "spend more time in the saddle than it took to get there and get home" rule of thumb for biking in Atlanta! Here's the full map of the week:

If you're going to be in Santa Fe and ride mountain bikes, it's definitely fitting in some of these things, and the Santa Fe area might actually be a good destination for a mountain biking specific trip. Get this map, take a GPS, and stay somewhere in town! From what Chad tells me, there is more great mountain biking around Los Alamos which is very doable if you have a car, and there is more mountain biking around the Windsor trail that I didn't have time to do. Check out the rest of the photos at http://ckdake.com/gallery/2009/santafe-mtb/.

SugarCON was last week, so I was in San Francisco, California to interact with some of SugarCRM's customers and other employees. We did a good bit of socializing which is partly captured in this photo album of pictures from my little camera, but I took a lot of pictures with the big camera and some things are worth pointing out here. Tuesday evening was the SugarCON boat cruise around the bay, which had some awesome views including:

Wednesday after SugarCON ended, a few of us went to a shooting range for about an hour and took a few pictures inside. (I took this 365 picture on the way there.) San showed up on Thursday and did a bit of San Francisco exploring on her own, and after a boot-camp with some SugarCRM partners, the IT team and most of our significant others headed to Lake Tahoe for a few nights away from the city. The lake was a short walk through the woods from our cabin, and of the Lake Tahoe pictures I uploaded, these capture it pretty well:

We didn't do any winter sports other than throwing a few snowballs, but it was nice to have casual conversations with work people over beers or in the hot tub instead of on IRC. (Also, FYI, when you see "tonemapped" in a URL of a picture here, its a tonemapped HDR image resulting from a combination of 3 images that gives more details in highlights and shadows than a single image would, sometimes more accurately producing the look of a scene and sometimes just making it look awesome.) On Sunday, Jesse, Seth, San and I headed back towards the cost with the hope of reaching Point Reyes before sunset. On the way, we stopped a few times. First for a bathroom break and some pictures including:

Then, at a Point Reyes visitor center on the San Andreas Fault to walk along the "earthquake trail" and break open our 1.5lb bacon and cheese sandwich on the fault line:

Even though we made it to Point Reyes lighthouse before sundown, it was after 4:30pm so the visitor center and lighthouse were closed. Regardless, some great views:

We arrived back in San Francisco under the cover of darkness, and got in some exploring the next day before heading home including Twin Peaks, Fort Point NHS, and the Golden Gate Botanical Gardens:

More pictures from everything are in these albums:

• SugarCON Boat Trip
• Shooting in CA
• Lake Tahoe on Saturday
• Point Reyes
• Exploring San Francisco
• SugarCON etc

All in all, it was a pretty good trip but after 10 days away from home, I was glad to be back!

Another year, another Gallery Developer Conference somewhere awesome, and this year it was an excuse to take some extra vacation days from work and explore. So on July 10th, San and I hopped on a plan to Amsterdam. After a slightly uncomfortable flight due to a large group on a youth ambassador trip that decided not to sleep on the overnight flight, we arrived and found our way to the hotel to meet up with the rest of the Gallery group. I won't walk through everything here, but will point out some highlights from the trip. Read on to the full post for all the details!

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to Amsterdam for the 4th annual Gallery developers conference. Last year in San Francisco was pretty great, and though the crowd will be a little smaller in Amsterdam, we should have a pretty good time! After that, San and I head to Paris for close to a week of tourism there, including seeing the end of the last stage of the Tour de France.

If you need to get in touch with me for any reason, just send me and email and I promise I'll go through each and every one when I get back! If something is urgent, send me an email and then send a text message to my cell phone. I should be able to receive those there, and I'll get in front of a computer if I need to.

As of the 2nd, I'm 24 now. It's not really any different than any other day, but this is the first birthday I've had after being done with school, having a real job, owning a house, etc, so thats kinda neat.

Some spoils:

• Shed from the parents for storing yard tools, etc
• Leatherman Skeletool from San
• LEGOs from San
• Daniel J. Boorstin Reader from parents
• Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock for Wii with 2 Guitars from Roger/Ben/Frank/Kurt/Me
• 5 Pizzas from San
• Something unknown in the mail from my brother. Will update here when it gets here -> Antitrust DVD and a book "Stuff White People Like"
• Entirely too many facebook wall, etc, posts from lots of people

I'll probably get me a Dell MD1000 for my hosting setup sometime in the next month or two, but that's not really birthday related.

Last weekend was spent in Destin, FL with San and some of her relatives. I took a few pictures and the good ones are here. These include some of my first fireworks pictures that aren't awful. The gorillapod worked out pretty well but next time, perhaps I'll remember my remote shutter release.

In 2 Weeks I'll be in Amsterdam for the 4th Galery Developer Conference, and then it's off to Paris. While I've been to both before, hanging out with Gallery people in Amsterdam will be a lot of fun, and I'm managing to squeeze in seeing the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris! Expect many pictures.

It's been a little over a month since I broke my collarbone, things are slowly getting back to normal. I still haven't ridden a bike outside yet, but I've been on the trainer almost every day and when it's all said and done will have put in ~1000 miles on it. The first 30 days I been worked on my cadence and can do ~125RPMs for as long as I feel like it (on the lowest resistance setting on the trainer) and for the last few days (and next 20 or so) I'm cranking up the resistance and seeing how big I can make the sweat puddle. I'm thinking I should get a heart rate monitor to figure out how much work I'm actually doing. I'm back to using two hands to type pretty well but I'm still mousing with my left hand which is less weird than a month ago but still kinda weird, and it's still not a good idea for me to do things like open bags of chips. More X-Rays in a few weeks and we'll see how it's doing!

I also finally got around to taking some pictures of my house. I bought it in December but have been waiting for things to get a bit more moved in. Theres still no dining room table or bed, but I'm not going to be doing any heavy lifting soon so figure it was time to share some pictures of it as is. Nothing has broken yet, Greg has been awesome by coming over to mow since I'm busted, and thanks to my parents I have some trees and bushes planted in the back yard. If you're in the neighborhood and need to watch a HD movie or play some super smash brothers on a big TV, or have a beer on the back porch, just let me know!

In other news:

• My brother got married and is off to New Zealand for his honeymoon!
• San and I have our plane tickets and hotel reservations for this years Gallery Developer Conference, Amsterdam and Paris in July!
• They finally put no parking signs on my street on one side. Now it will be possible for things like the Garbage and UPS trucks to make it down the street since cars will only be on one side. Getting out of the driveway will be a lot easier too!

Last weekend, Roger and I headed up to Montreal, Quebec. The reason for this trip was because Roger had never been and asked if I wanted to go, so we went. Highlights inlude:

• Hanging out with Gabrielle (a friend of mine from high school, we stayed at her place and slept on couches for the weekend) and seeing what downtown had to offer for eating and drinking Saturday evening.
• Walking around all day Sunday: where we walked (separated by the bike map below). Things we saw included St Joseph's, Mount Royal, Old Port, and Downtown.
• Biked around for a few hours on Sunday: where we biked (not quite accurate but thats the gist of it.) We saw a lot of the Lachine Canal, the Lachine Locks, and more of the City.
• Walked around on Monday before heading to the airport: where we walked. (this includes a metro ride from the city to the first island). We saw the Metro, the Biosphere, Habitat 67, the river, and a lot of the industrial side of the port.

Overall: Montreal is a very bike friendly city (bike lanes/roads and bikers everywhere) and is surprisingly clean given the dense urban feel of every place we were. The weather was a bit drizzly at first but kept getting better the entire time, and you can see all of my pictures here. We walked and biked a lot, and we ready to be off our feet for the plane trip home.