Rogue Wolves Home of the Wolfman

As some of you know, my brother Steve lives down in Southern California near San Diego which is where all the fires in California are burning. I've talked with Steve last night and he and his family are fine. There was a fire about six miles away but it is now contained and they are in no immediate danger and have not been evacuated. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way.

Before I talked with him I was pretty worried when I found the below google map marking the fires, evacuation areas, etc. He's pretty much surrounded by fires but they are fortunately far away still. Take a look at that map and see how wide spread the fires are. (Steve lives in San Marcos near Oceanside).

I've also been using Twitter to keep track of the latest news. News seems to break there way faster than the media networks. It's a great use for the technology. If you haven't used twitter it's like the Facebook status messages (*) but much more flexible in that you can choose to follow particular people or key words (tags) and be notified of new messages via twitter.com, SMS, Instant Messaging, etc. There is an API to the service so there are many different clients to access the service. Careful if you use the SMS feature because it can potentially send a lot of messages to your cell phone and may cost you some big $$$

(*) If you have no idea what a Facebook status message is, it's basically a simple way to tell people what you are doing, thinking, feeling, etc. It sounds mundane but it is actually a nice light weight way to keep people up to date on what is happening in your world. Twitter takes this a step further.

Examples of Twitter Commands

follow slangevi - this tells twitter to follow this user and notify you of their updates

leave slangevi - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of the users updates

track sandiegofire - this tells twitter to notify you of any twitter messages that contain this keyword

untrack sandiegofire - this tells twitter to stop notifying you of any twitter messages containing this keyword

Anyways, I thought the use of Google maps and twitter as public announcement tools was interesting and thought I'd pass it along.

Here is some Help on Twitter Commands. Note that the track/untrack command isn't listed as its a fairly new feature.

Okay okay! So it has been quite a while since a blog update (I suck at this) so let me catch you up on what has been happening in our world. Rather than one big post I'll break this up into several smaller posts.

So where do I begin? First off, the MS Bike marathon I participated in at the end of september went great. I can't believe I rode my bike 150 miles. I confess, I was nervous as hell about the ride. I wasn't sure if I would make it to the end, but I surprised myself at how well I did. It was amazing how many cyclists particpate. There were roughly 2,500 cyclists on the road. Overall the weather was good, it poured rain the morning of the first day but after that it was nice and sunny and not too hot. The second day had a brutal head wind in the morning but turned beautiful like day one. I can't complain because I was worried it would be 40 degrees Celsius the whole time like the previous weekend. I doubt I would have lasted long in that heat.

The marathon was not without mishaps. The first mishap was my fault, it was only a couple miles into the race where we came up to a stop light. I failed to see a cop holding traffic and waving us through. I stopped at the red light. If you have ever been in a marathon you know what a fatal mistake this is. I nearly caused a pile up as everyone behind me screeched on their brakes. I quickly realized my mistake and put on the after burners (I wanted to get the hell out of there before they lynched me). Nobody wiped out so it wasn't a big deal, just not a good way to start the marathon. Ooops. Lesson learned: pay attention!

The second misshap a cyclist lost traction while zipped around a turn and completely wiped out right in front of me. Luckily, I was able to manuever around him and avoid running him over and crashing myself. He turned out to be okay with just a little road rash.

The final misshap for the day occurred less than eight miles from the day one finish line. I blew out a tire. It was right outside the last rest stop where they had a bike mechanic so I lucked out. Less than ten minutes later and I was back on the road. I finished out the day traveling 75 miles in about five hours giving me an average of 15mph.

The morning of the second day I was exhausted and stiff and was close to bailing on the ride but I forced myself to give it a try. I'm glad I did because it didn't take long for my muscles to loosen and adrenaline to start pumping again. The second day turned out to be easier than the first (after I busted my ass through a nasty headwind), probably because I teamed up with a really good cycling group called Boobs on Tubes (no joke!). They rocked! We had a great momentum going. I can't stress the importance of riding with a group on one of these rides. Less work + kick ass speed. They were a really fun group. The only mishap for day two was getting lost. Before we teamed up with Boobs on Tubes I failed to see a route sign and ended up in no mans land. Fortunately I realized mu mistake fifteen minutes later and back tracked. Not a big deal. Considering I can get lost in my own backyard, this was to be expected. My average speed for day two was 16mph.

Crossing the finish line was such an awesome feeling. I'm definitely going to do the ride again next year. They plan on changing the route because there were spots were you rode on a busy highway. We had several close calls were jackasses would cut right in front of us to take an off ramp, or not move over and narrowly miss you with their side mirrors. When someone is driving past you at sixy miles per hour and narrowly misses you its a bit unnerving. The coordinators plan to fix this next year and avoid the main roads as much as possible.

All in all it was a great experience and I can't wait for my next big ride. I'm addicted.

Robbi took some great pics and a movie of me crossing the finish line but unfortunately my hard drive crashed recently and I lost them along with two months of data. Sigh. Back up now if you are reading this. You have been warned. The MS Society has put up pics of the event on flickr here and here.

Tomorrow we are heading off camping for some nice rest and relaxation in Linville Falls North Carolina. It's finally cool enough down here to start camping.

That's it for now. I'll post more soon.

My brother Steve has created a hockey discussion/news site named appropriately: TotallyHockey. The site is pretty bare bones right now but he did post his playoff predictions. Go check it out. Steve lives and breaths hockey and knows his stuff. You can see his predictions for each round and how they have panned out. He told me his long term goals are to turn TotallyHockey into a hockey journalism site with multiple contributers that discusses and reports on everything hockey.

Good Luck with the site Steve. I won't hold it against you that you predicted the Canucks would lose to the Ducks in five...mainly because you were right.

Here is great video created by Lee Lefever of Common Craft. It's a non-technical explanation of the benefits of RSS/ATOM in an easy to understand and entertaining manner. If you want to convert any of the non-technorati people in your life to the joys of RSS readers, this is a great video to point them to.

We made this video for our friends (and yours) that haven't yet felt the power of our friend the RSS reader. We want to convert people and if you know someone who would love RSS and hasn't yet tried it, point them here for about 3.5 minutes. If you'd like to share this video, please do! Grab the code here.

Also, if you enjoy this video you might want to subscribe to Common Craft's new show where they plan to post more videos on technology in this style:

The Common Craft show is a new series of videos done in a format we call "paperwork". Our goal is to make technology easier to understand for the less geeky people of the world.

Cross posted on: RogueWolves.com

Update: Fixed video so it will now play embedded in the webpage.

After chickening out two previous years this year I'm determined to enter in the MS Bike to the Beach. It's a grueling 150 mile two day ride that starts at Columbia SC and ends at beautiful Myrtle Beach.

National MS Society Website:

Join 2,500 cyclists from across the region as they ride the southeast’s premier cycling event, the annual Start to Finish MS Breakaway to the Beach Bike Ride. This year, we are excited to announce a new, two-day, 150 mile course that begins and ends in beautiful Myrtle Beach, SC! This new and improved rally route offers cyclists the option of riding a 35 and 75 mile course each day, and a 100 mile course on Saturday. Fully supported rest stops are located every 6-10 miles, including food, drink and restrooms. This ride is fully supported by bike mechanics, mechanics, medical personnel, support wagons, police, route marshals, massage therapists and dedicated volunteers.

Since I'm serious about doing this event I've started training and have suckered in a friend of mine. He mistakenly agreed to doing the ride while drunk one evening and little did he know I would hold him to it! Seriously, he's excited to do the ride and we are a good pair because we push each other. Our training so far is one hour of biking and one hour of running every tuesday through friday. Damn I'm hurting. It's week two so I'm starting to get in the groove but the last few days we've really stepped things up.

Another good thing about doing this ride is that it's raising money for MS research. I have to get people to sponsor my ride so I might ask for donations closer to the event. You have been warned! I've got six months to train which should be lots of time to turn myself into Lance Armstrong...okay maybe not Lance...but someone that can actually attempt this ride. I see two major challenges ahead:

1. Staying Motivated
2. Learning to bike in intense heat/humidity

When I say intense heat I'm not kidding. The bike ride is in late September when temperatures here are still in the low to mid 30's. That's the main reason I've chickened out in the past. I thought the heat would kill me. It's now closing in on three years we've been here (wow) and I think I may finally start to be climatized (well as much as a Northerner can anyways) to the point where I can survive the ordeal. Here's to hoping anyways.

I'll keep you posted on our progress. Wish me luck!