I figured that starting off on a fixed gear or a full suspension mountain bike might not be the best thing for my still recovering collarbone, so I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to get a road bike. I researched around online and narrowed it down to a 2008 Roubaix Elite Compact. All Shimano 105 except the brakes and cranks, about what my budget was, and I like the way it looks. However, when I got to Outback Bikes to buy one, they had some 2007 models left over... So I ended up picking up a 2007 version of the Roubaix Comp Compact for a few hundred dollars less than they were selling the Elite for. This one has Shimano 105 brakes and cranks, and slightly nicer wheels. Another great deal on a bike from Outback (I got my full-suspension mountain bike in a similar situation there a few years ago). I'm going to try a few laps around the block later today and hopefully the doctor on Monday will say that I'm good to start seriously riding outside again! Hopefully those ~1000 miles I've done on the trainer will pay off...

I take a lot of pictures. I figure I should post them on here. Here goes one. This is a HDR of the trees in my backyard:

(If you see a "used without permission" watermark on the image in your feed reader, please let me know in a comment or by email, so that I can add it to the list of allowed referrers!)

I use F-Spot to manage my photographs. It's fast, clean, simple, and does everything in my current workflow which is JPG on camera -> YYYY/MM/DD folders -> Gallery on my website. Once I start shooting RAW it will get a little more complicated, but F-Spot keeps moving forward so hopefully they'll come up with a plan for that.

When uploading images to Gallery, I noticed that my photo timestamps were off. Conveniently, there was a discussion about this on the F-Spot mailing list at the same time and it turns out that every time you import an image in F-Spot, it adjusts the EXIF Timestamp information based on your timezone. Basically, if you're 5 hours away from GMT, on import F-Spot writes to the file that the image was taken 5 hours later than it actually was. Not only does it do this once, but if you re-import images into F-Spot for whatever reason it does this again, again, and again.

This was a bit of a surprise because EXIF information written by the camera shouldn't be changed by an import program! I thought I'd lost all the actual capture date/times of my ~30,000 photos, and was getting pretty upset that software would do this, but after digging through EXIF headers from all the cameras I've had, it turns out that the "DateTimeOriginal" was still good! I disabled F-Spots ability to write metadata to files (which means I'll have to stop tagging images until this is all resolved upstream) and wrote a little script to fix my files. If you've run into this and would like your original EXIF information back so that photos taken on New Years Eve as the year ticks over aren't at some hour after sunrise on Jan 1st, use this! Just replace $directory with the path to your photo library, store it to a file named "fixer.pl" and run "perl fixer.pl". Note that you'll need find and jhead installed.

EDIT: Note! I looked at this again with my 40D and new version of f-spot. It seems that now the correct EXIF header is "DateTimeDigitized" and _NOT_ "DateTimeOriginal". Please verify things on your setup before running this random script you found on the internet!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use strict;

my $directory = "/media/photos/";

my %opts;
my @files;

@files = `find $directory -type f -iregex \'.*\\.\\(jpg\\|jpeg\\)\'`;

foreach my $file (@files) {
        chomp $file;
        my $dateline = `jhead -v "$file" | grep DateTimeOriginal`;
        if (defined($dateline)) {
                $dateline =~ /.*\"(.*)\".*/;
                my $date = $1;
                if (defined($date)) {
                        $date =~ s/ /-/g;
                        system("jhead -ts$date \"$file\"");
                        system("jhead -ft \"$file\"");
                }
        }
}

I just realized that my yahoo profile is now over 10 years old! I apparently created it on February 12, 1998, and while I know that I had AOL at home before that for perhaps around a year, I can't find any indication that they provide account creation dates anywhere in their system. (And back before AIM was properly integrated, I had to switch from ckdake to theckdake when we canceled AOL and didn't get to switch back to ckdake until perhaps college?)

Before AOL, I got online once or twice at a friends house, but I know my first experience online was at the 99X booth at some olympic experience thing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. They had a web browser, I typed in "games" in the address bar and alas, couldn't get to any games. Needless to say I didn't realize that the internet was good to have until later.

In 1999, I purchased my first domain name: ithought.org (for $70 a year or something stupid expensive from Network Solutions) and it's still the one I use for all my servers. ckdake.com finally showed up in 2004.

Things sure have come a long way in ~12 years!

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!

Yeah, I broke my collarbone this weekend. I'm going to the effort of typing this up here, so that when people want the whole story i don't have to laboriously type a shorter version on AIM or something.

Saturday morning I got up around 6:30 to head up to North Georgia with Christopher, Kurt, and a pack of people I didn't know. It was pretty overcast with a chance of rain, but we felt chance was in our favor. We met up in a Waffle House parking lot, and the caravan of ~6 cars full of bikes and bikers headed up to Ellijay, GA. As we got closer it started raining, and by the time we got to the trailhead, it was absolutely pouring. Usually, we don't ride in wet conditions because it damages the trails, but the day's ride consisted of gravel fire roads and rock trails with stream crossings, so we wouldn't really be doing any damage.

It took a while for everyone to get suited up, but we finally got going: fire roads and trails uphill for miles. Several of us, me included, thought the pace of the leaders was a bit fast for what was going to be a 4 hour ride, but we all stayed fairly close and I don't think anyone was going slower than they wanted too (and a few people had a race to compete in the next day). It was very wet and while we were completely soaked before we started, somehow we got even wetter. This was my first mountain ride in the rain, and while wet, it was actually pretty nice. On a sunny day, I'm usually pretty hesitant to go through mud or make a stream crossing, but once I'm gross, it's a lot easier to do those things without thinking about it.

Halfway up the elevation gain, there was a great view of the low clouds in the mountains, but unfortunately I left my cameraphone in the car due to the weather (and my weatherproof GPS does't have a camera). The 3 of us in the back told everyone else to go ahead, and we started up the second half of the climb about 5 minutes after them. And what a climb it was! See the profile below:

While going uphill was very hard, the downhill was actually worse. It was still raining, and that combined with the mud my front tire was throwing up made it very hard to see. The 3 of us were flying down a gravel road when I noticed that I was catching up to them. This seemed like a good thing, but it turned out that I was going way too fast. I barely saw the outline of a sharp right turn in front of me and as I started to brake, I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to stop or make the turn, and was faced with an easy decision: drop the bike or launch myself off a cliff. While both tires were locked up and skidding, i kicked my back wheel to the left and dropped my bike on the right side. It stopped me pretty quickly and hurt extremely bad. While just glad to not be off the cliff, this still wasn't fun. I could feel the scuff marks on my back from the gravel, but after sitting still for a few seconds to catch my breath, I realized my collarbone was broken. I gave it a good whack to try and align it properly while the adrenaline was in full force and before the pain or reality really set in, and we then started to worry about me going into shock.

Doh! We were on the top of a mountain in the middle of the woods in the cold rain with no way to get out and no way to stay warm. Thankfully, a lost car pulled up a few minutes later. The guy I was with stashed my bike in the woods and the helpful family up there for some fishing helped me into their car. They were lost as well, but I pulled out my GPS and it gave us directions to the closest emergency room, the North Georgia Medical Center. Over an hour passed and we made it there. They dropped me off and went to fix a flat tire on their car and that's the last I saw of them. So there I was, alone in the ER, wearing spandex, soaking wet, and covered in dirt, without a wallet or phone. They took some x-rays, got my arm in a sling, and suggested I see an Orthopedic surgeon in the next few days, noting that it's a simple fracture that didn't separate. Not 20 minutes later, Kurt and Christopher picked me up at the ER after finishing their ride and we headed back to Atlanta.

After further inspection, the bite valve of my camelback is gone, and my helmet has a huge split in it, so it possibly saved my life. (Wear your helmets kids!) All in all, this is really annoying because I can't really ride for 2 months, it's hard to sleep, and really only being able to use my left hand is not fun, but it could have been a lot worse! While I missed out on the last 2/3 of the ride (which apparently is all awesome, technical, downhill with lots of stream crossings), I'm relatively well off with such a simple injury. Much worse could have happened if I hadn't been thinking, and of the very large number of my friends that have broken a bone biking, many of them needed surgery and metal plates or screws in their ankles, wrists, or collarbones. Health insurance is a good thing (16 pain pills were $3), and hopefully my bike will find it's way home! (I think the guy that hid it drove up the mountain to pick it up after he finished riding.)

So much thanks to everyone that helped, especially the many of you that I don't know. It's going to be quiet on here for a few weeks and I won't be e-mailing much, but I'll be back typing and riding as soon as possible!