ZenLinux Blog

Today I rode in the Worst Day of the Year bike ride, which supports the Portland Community Cycling Center. The ride is held every year in the middle of winter and typically involves adverse weather. Fortunately today the rain ended just before the ride started, and the sun even came out by the end of it.

Worst Day of the Year Ride - Waterfront

The ride is a great example of Portland’s quirkiness. Costumes are highly encouraged, and the ride has a fun and family-friendly atmosphere. There were lots of whoops and cheers among the 3,000 riders who participated in this year’s event.

Worst Day of the Year Ride - Bee Costumes

The ride ended with some excellent spinach lentil soup and bread from Laughing Planet. I didn’t ride with a costume this time, but I’m thinking it would be worthwhile for me to piece something together to keep handy.

My elation over living in Portland – literally a bicycling paradise in the United States – hasn’t subsided yet. As I ride through the city I can’t wipe the smile off my face from seeing all the other people out on bikes, and learning how progressive the transportation infrastructure is. For the benefit of my friends back East, here are a few videos I found on YouTube that describe what we have out here.

Of course Portland has bike lanes – over 100 miles of them – but you might be surprised to find that streets with bike lanes aren’t necessarily the safest way to get around by bike in the city. One of the most intriguing strategies the city has come up with is optimizing certain side roads as bicycle boulevards; streets where traffic flow is optimized for bicycles and pedestrians.

One of the coolest things about bike boulevards is how they’re such a win-win situation for the communities where they’re placed. Homeowners love having their street designated as a bike boulevard, as it makes the street safer and more family-friendly, and helps to raise home values.

When cycling around NH, I generally avoided routes with traffic lights on them whenever possible because of the difficulty or outright impossibility of tripping the traffic sensors to change the light. These kinds of intersections are also where plenty of crashes with cars can occur when a bike or car wants to turn. Portland actually has traffic sensors at many lights specifically designed to be triggered by bicycles, and in some cases, even dedicated lights for bicycle traffic:

…and to make tricky intersections safer for everyone, bike boxes (my apologies for the corny nature of this video):

All of this infrastructure costs very little as a percentage of the overall transportation budget in Portland, and the return on investment is huge. It reduces auto congestion and pollution, and helps Portland solidify its reputation as a sustainable and environmentally progressive city.

I’ll be continually smiling on my bike for some time, I’m sure.

My plans are shaping up to visit the incredible city of Portland, OR next month.

Portland Bike Box

My plans currently don’t involve renting a car because the public transportation and bicycling infrastructure is so amazing there. The one downside is I’ll be there during the rainy season (defined as October through May), but I’ve become hardcore enough about bike commuting that I already have some wet weather gear I’ll bring along with me. With plenty of bike shops that rent bikes, I’m really looking forward to exploring the city on a deeper level than my previous visits.

This blog is starting to become pretty heavily-themed as a cycling blog. I suppose it’s because things at work have been pretty hectic, and at this point all I do is work and ride (especially to relieve work-related stress).

Anyway, I went on a ride this morning with a friend and took some photos. Enjoy some of the fall colors of New Hampshire:

Last weekend was a bike-filled one. On Saturday I rode 100 miles in the Tri-State Seacoast Century. This is the same ride I did last year, when it was my first-ever century ride. This time it was my third (having done my second one in late July).

Hampton Beach

Rye Beach

Former Naval Prison

For once, I’m glad to say it wasn’t a dramatic experience. I rode on my own for most of the ride, but shortly after mile 80 I managed to hop on the back of a decent-sized paceline and enjoyed a nice draft for the rest of the ride (when it counted the most). I finished in 6 hours, 55 minutes of time on the bike. I felt really good after the ride, better than I ever have before. My new Salsa Casseroll is turning out to be a great investment in the type of riding I do.

Nubble Lighthouse

On Sunday I rode with a buddy out to see the Portsmouth Crit. We arrived just in time to see the men’s Pro race, though I could tell there was so much going on that it would have been worthwhile to make a full day of it.

Portsmouth Crit

Having completed my first century last September, I made it my goal for 2008 to ride two centuries this year. I was hoping to do one in June, but that never worked out. Fortunately, during the last Saturday in July the weather in NH was expected to be clear of thunderstorms and with reasonably low humidity, so I jumped at the opportunity to get my first century of 2008 in.

The thought of doing a solo century was pretty daunting to me, so I managed to set up the route in such a way that a middle leg of the ride could be done as a metric century (100km/62mi). Chris decided to join me, and thus here is a tale of two centuries: my imperial and Chris’ (first ever) metric.

I began the ride at 6 AM and completed about 25 miles in the early morning.

At one point I saw group of something crossing the road. It turned out to be a family of wild turkeys.

As I returned to the starting point, Chris was right on time and we promptly embarked on a journey out to the Nubble Lighthouse on the Maine seacoast.

The ride out the Maine seacoast was peaceful while we remained on back roads. Finally, we arrived at our destination: Nubble Light in York, ME.

When we returned to our starting point, Chris celebrated his new milestone, but I still had another 10 miles to go to round out my imperial century. Those 10 miles were pretty agonizing, but I completed them (with more stops that I’d care to admit). I ended up completing the ride in 7h11m on the bike. It was more than a half-hour slower than my first century (6:35), but as far as I’m concerned, just completing a century is a feat in itself, whether it takes 5 hours or 10.

For my second century, I will be riding in the Tri-State Seacoast Century again. I’m really looking forward to it.

As a cyclist and bike commuter, I’m thrilled to see that the NH “Bike Bill”, HB 1203, has passed in both the NH House and Senate and is on its way to the Governor’s desk for a signature. This bill establishes, among other things, that motorists passing a cyclist on the road must give at least three feet of clearance while passing, or potentially face a $100 fine. It also states that road construction projects must give consideration to use of the road by cyclists and avoid creating hazards (such as ill-placed rumble strips and drain grates) to cyclists.

This legislation was modeled after similar laws that now exist in 20 other states. I really hope it will help to improve riding conditions for responsible cyclists in NH.

The Garmin Edge 305 is a really cool bike computer which includes GPS features to map rides in addition to the typical speed and mileage information. I recently picked one up and am looking into getting it working under Linux.

Before I explore my Linux options, I wanted to see what the Garmin Training Center Software was like under Windows. I run Windows XP within a VirtualBox virtual machine which is running on top of my Ubuntu Gutsy OS. Getting USB devices to work with virtual machine guests is not simple, so I thought I’d share the resources I used to get it working.

First, to set up the USB system requirements that VirtualBox needs on Ubuntu Gutsy, you need to follow this guide. It will walk you through creating a separate group for USB access and enabling the usbfs support which is disabled by default in Gutsy.

Once you’ve done that, follow the remaining steps in that guide to configure your VirtualBox XP guest to access the Garmin’s USB device ID. By this point you will then almost be able to access the device fully within the WinXP guest by right-clicking on the VirtualBox USB icon and checking the Garmin USB device. Unfortunately this isn’t enough to trigger the Garmin gStart daemon.

To resolve this final problem, open up the Windows XP device manager (right-click My Computer->Properties and select the Hardware tab). Within the device manager you need to disable and then re-enable the Garmin USB GPS device, and gStart will properly detect the connection event and allow you to access the device from the Training Center software.

That’s the magic incantation you need to get this device working properly using a VirtualBox VM.

Update 2009-07-25: There is a better way you can automate the restarting of the Garmin device. Check out these instructions for details – they worked great for me. And thanks riaan for the tip!