Shortly after taking up mountain biking two years ago, I bought myself a GPS – a Garmin Edge 705. I had been using an iPhone app before that but soon found that it quickly drained my battery. I didn’t want to be out in the woods and not know where I was or be able to call somebody. That’s why I decided to get a dedicated GPS device. Or at least that’s how I justified getting a new expensive toy…

Once I had the Garmin I started uploading my mountain biking rides on Garmin Connect, as well as tracking my exercise on DailyMile.com. Additionally I was looking at my rides using Garmin BaseCamp and Google Earth to see how things looked in 3D!

At some point I bought a copy of Desktop GIS but I don’t remember when or why I did that. I remember going through some of the examples but eventually losing interest and finding the software they used to be very buggy.

The main place I started out mountain biking at was Graham Hills Park in and some members of the Westchester Mountain Biking Association were asking for an updated map of Graham. Since I own Adobe Illustrator I decided to take a stab at making something that looked good using the GPS tracks, print outs, hand drawn maps and Google Maps and Google Earth.

It was well received and I ended up working with Westchester County Parks to put together an official map. You can download the final map here: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

At the end of last summer another trail project was starting up. This time it was the New York – New Jersey Trail Conference working with the WMBA on some multi-use trails up in Yorktown called the Yorktown Community Trails. I offered to help out with the maps of those parks and have been working on them the last few months.

One of the painful parts of using Adobe Illustrator for making maps is getting images/screenshots from various applications and sites to line up correctly. Once that’s done tracing trails is fairly easy. I have things organized into several layers to make it easier to manage styles, colors and layer order. Another painful step is getting contour lines into Illustrator. On top of aligning everything correctly, it can be quite time consuming and wrist stiffening to trace all the contour (height) lines that make a hiking/biking map more useful. To cap it all off, all these lines are just that – lines. They have no data associated with them. Nothing about the trail name, length, height or difficulty level. So I started looking at GIS again to see if it could help me produce equal quality maps that also contained data which I could use to style the maps.

I started by taking a course on GIS by the GIS masters (or at least the giant), ESRI. ESRI produces a number of GIS applications and they are all insanely expensive for somebody doing volunteer work in their spare time. But they have a 60 day trial of their software so I figured I might as well see what all the hoopla was about. I put several hours into Getting Started with GIS and ended up getting a 100% on the final exam. Woo! Go me! It was an insightful course and definitely taught me a number of things.

I had to keep in mind that the software is several thousand dollars so I needed to check out some cheaper alternatives. I’m a Mac user so it reduces the number of available applications a bit. After playing with a number of different applications (from expensive to free) I’ve settled on Quantum GIS. It’s a free multi-platform GIS application that supports a good number of features and is also extensible using Python or C++.

I’m still figuring out my map making workflow, but it currently goes something like this:

1. Pick the park I want to make a map of
2. Collect GPS data of trails from the park (either by riding their myself or finding routes online at places like Garmin Connect)
3. Combine the GPS data using GPSBabel
4. Load the GPS tracks into Quantum GIS
5. Use the OpenStreetMap plugin to get roads, areas and points of interest from the surrounding area for reference (and for street data)
6. Use U.S. Geological Survey’s Earth Exporer to find heightmaps for the park area.
7. Use the Clipper plugin to trim the heightmap data to the area of interest (this makes QGIS work faster since I don’t have a bunch of data I don’t care about)
8. Use the Contour plugin to generate contour lines. I sometimes generate them ever 5 meters and every 25 meters. This lets me make the 25 meter ones a little bolder for easier reference.
9. Create a new Vector (Lines) layer in which I refine the GPS tracks into discernible, named trails with blaze color information.

So far I’ve gotten my QGIS maps to look pretty close to the ones I’ve made in Illustrator.

There’s still plenty to figure out. Some of the things I still need to work on are:

• Figuring out how Map Units work in QGIS so I can
• Generate things like trail length and a working Scale Bar
• Use symbols for Bridges that scale correctly with the size/zoom level of the map
• Figure out how to turn heightmap data in meters into feet (assuming the map should use feet instead of meters)
• Master the vector editing tools.

An upgrade issue left me unable to attend DevOps Days Boston, which bummed me out a little bit, but I at least ended up selling my ticket to somebody else.

At work somebody introduced me to Sinatra, which is a Ruby DSL for building simply dynamic web sites and Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby web apps.. I put this together with Markdown (which I discovered doing the Maven book) and created http://notes.buildndeploy.com/, which I’m using to write up and share notes I make about various languages, technologies and tools.

I ended up registering www.buildndeploy.com and moving that site from WordPress to Posterous since they don’t charge you for custom domain names. I’ve also been getting rid of domain names I no longer need and moving the ones I’m keeping to keep to DNSimple, a cheaper and infinitely better alternative to GoDaddy. Between the notes site and the main site I’ve gotten a decent amount done with this effort.

My mountain bike map of Graham Hills Park was finally signed off on and is now availale: http://wmba.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/graham-hills-park.pdf

I’ve been steadily saving for a new iMac but slowed down my savings just a little bit when rumors started popping up about them coming out with new models in June or July. I had originally targetted forgetting one in April. Lately the buzz has been saying late April/early May. Either way, I should have enough put aside to get a nice iMac.

In the middle of March Kim and I attended PAX East with her sister, brother-in-law and my friend Dan and his girlfriend (also named Kim). The highlight of the show was seeing Jonathan Coulton play which really got me thinking about writing music again. I’ve started noodling around on my guitar more and recording some ideas in the back room of the apartment, which I’ve been doing a lot of clean up on.

JoCo’s lyrics got me thinking about opening myself up to writing about what I know more. I also realized that while I’ve treated programming as something I should always try and read and learn more about, I’ve never treated music that way – I always felt like songs should come from some inherent, untrained magical ability. I realized this was a stupid notion and picked up the book Writing Better Lyrics, as well as a thesaurus and a rhyming dictionary. The thesaurus has been pretty neat and interesting to flip through. I’ve been making an effort to do Object Writing every morning as suggested by the lyrics book. I’m about 12 days in with a couple of missed days here and there. I’ve also been working on “worksheets” for my songs to try and cultivate more lyrics and ideas for them.

Just today I dropped off my electric guitar and bass at the new guitar shop in Tarrytown called Rock Island Sound to get them set up and have their electronics checked out. I also put two other guitars on consignment since I never use them. That helps clear out the back room some more and hopefully bring in a little extra cash. I might use that to get one of the pretty guitars they have there though…

Yesterday I put a lot of time into rearranging our bedroom. I moved the bed to the back of the room by the windows instead of off to the side. This makes the room and space for each of us symmetrical. I also got rid of the big computer desk I’ve had for probably 10 years. I want something simpler and easier to move. The big desk had to be taken completely apart just to move it to another room. I’m not interested in dealing with it anymore.

I’m still using Google Voice for texting but am pretty disappointed in the iPhone App for it. It’s always hanging and crashing and the UI can be quite flakey fairly often. I also ended up going over my new data limit this month for the iPhone so it almost negated the savings on the cheaper text and data plan. This month should be better.

Another daily (workday) habit I’ve been doing is reading a card from the Agile in a Flash card deck and reflecting on it via Twitter. I’ve even engaged with the author himself, Tim Ottinger, on Twitter, asking questions, getting feedback and generally being challenged to think more and do them each day.

In the money/budget category… well, my budget was a little shaky towards the end of the month, but overall I think it was okay. One of the smarter buying choices I made this month was passing on getting an AirPort Extreme and just buying a NetGear WAP using the Best Buy gift certificate my brother got me for Christmas. (Update: The day after this post I saw this article which some might be interested in: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/04/04/is-the-airport-extreme-worth-the-price/)

I only managed to get out on my mountain bike twice this month, and that was two days in the same weekend. The weather was less than agreeable in the beginning of the month but there were a few days here and there I should’ve gotten out on my bike but just didn’t. I need to step that up in April. Getting my gear in order and ready to go (especially for evenings) would be a big help. I’ve been considering thinking about getting an actually single speed mountain bike and a couple of friends have suggested getting a 29er, so I’ve been looking at bikes likes the Trek/Fisher Marlin Single Speed. No solid plans yet on that front though.

The lack of riding this month also means a lack of losing any weight :-/

The game designing and mapping have taken a back seat lately, so I ended up removing those categories from my Google Reader account. It was becoming a burden to keep up with them so I decided it was best to just remove them. Another small amount of simplification I’ve made in my online life is shutting off email notifications from Facebook. I’ve found this helps make it less distracting and results in less email to clean up after.

I was thinking this was another dud month as far as progress and accomplishments are concerned, but after seeing all I’ve written about above I feel pretty good about it.

I got my Garmin GPS back in August of 2009 and according to my Garmin Connect account I’ve logged 91 rides and 700 miles since then. I’m sure there are a few that are missing due to a dead battery or import problems.

I started using DailyMile back in September of 2009 and so far have logged 703 miles and burned 475 donuts! (they have neat stats!) DailyMiles really is a great site and I think people should check it out for recording all kinds of exercising activities. I track my biking and yoga on there.

My technical skills have been progressing a little slow but I’ve been purposely cautious so I don’t hurt myself. I love the sport so I’d hate to be knocked out of it for too long. I do want to step up my technical skills which means I need to step up how much I’m riding and pushing myself a little bit more.

I’ve also gotten involved in my local mountain biking group, the Westchester Mountain Biking Assocation. In fact, the link to their site is a newly organized site I put together in WordPress. The design is a WordPress theme, so I can’t take credit for that.

I’ve also been working on a mew map of Graham Hills Park using Adobe Illustrator which is very close to being finalized. I may tackle a map for Sprain Ridge Park next, but I want to wrap up the Graham one first. I dabbled a bit in some GIS and Cartography applications but am not sure that’s something I want to put too much more effort into. I’ll see what I feel like once the Graham map is finished. Still, it’s really nice to hear that my map has helped get emergency services to people more efficiently or helped new people enjoy the park more.

The newest project I’m involved in is a new set of trails being planned in Yorktown. So far this has mostly just been physical labor, but I’m okay with that. I’ve been reading up on cr

eating mountain biking trails, so I’m hoping that knowledge will become helpful in this project. There are some more experienced people involved so I’m ready to take a back seat and just learn what I can from the experience.

My friend Kate got me into yoga a few months ago and I feel like that has been helping me out in a few different ways. I should really step up how much I go though, because I need to take better advantage of my membership.

My weight has gone back up a bit since it was down to 193 and I need to make some stronger efforts to get it back down again. I’m not up at 240 again, but it felt nicer to look at myself when I was under 200. Hopefully stepping up the biking and the yoga (and lowering my calorie intake) will help me get back down.

In July, Kimberly and I competed in the Columbia Muddy Buddy which was a two person team race where you trade off mountain biking and running, along with a number of obstacles including a giant mud pit at the end. This was a lot of fun and required me to take up running for a bit – something I hadn’t done since high school! In our group we placed 10 out of 29 teams and placed approximately in the middle of the 400+ teams that participated. We both felt that was pretty good for our first time competing in an event like this.

My vacation started with a Saturday morning ride at Graham Hills Park. It was an early morning ride with my friend Kim that we managed to sneak in before some rain that day. We practiced a few areas but didn’t stick around too long so we wouldn’t get caught in the approaching rain. If it didn’t start raining I think we would’ve gone around a second time.

Tuesday and Wednesday were spent on the road to South Carolina. On Tuesday I stopped atWhite Clay Creek in Newark, Delaware to try and do some riding, but the trails were too muddy to really enjoy or respectfully ride on. I was looking forward to checking out the “skills trail” to try out a few technical obstacles but even the first one freaked me out, especially because I was by myself:

I arrived in Bluffton Wednesday afternoon and decided to kick off my week there with an evening road ride around the gated community my parents live in. It was also a nice chance to finally test out the helmet light I got a few weeks ago. The combination of the helmet light and a handlebar light worked very well, even in the foggy evening darkness.

Thursday morning I went for a ride with my dad at Pinckney Island, which I’m still not sure how to pronounce correctly. The ride was very pretty, but totally flat. I entertained myself by bunny hopping logs and practicing wheelies, enough so that I ended up breaking one of my pedals.

We stopped at Bluffton Bicycle Shop on the way back home to get me some new metal pedals and see if they knew about any local trails. This proved to be a fruitful stop because not only did I get fantastic new pedals but they also told me about a trail out on Hilton Head in Crossings Park. This place was just what I was looking for! Lots of thin, winding single-track and even a few hills and obstacles to tackle. I rode there are total of 5 times during my vacation.

Towards the end of the vacation my dad decided to give Crossings Park a try and did very well! He even humoured me by filming some footage of me in one of the more fun parts of the park.

My dad and I also checked out Tom Triplett Park in Pooler, GA but due to all the rain in the area it was full of puddles and hard to ride in. We lost the rail several times but I guess it was still a bit of an enjoyable.

One of the more surprising rides was the one my dad and I did at Folly Field Beach. I thought it would be really boring but it ended up being a lot of fun. There were plenty of things on the beach to bunny hop over and the sand helped give me an idea of how far I can hop (not very). There were also a few rocks and branches to traverse during the ride.

I’ve been using my Canon Vixia S HF10 to shoot all my mountain biking videos but I was getting really eager to pick up a helmet cam for some more exciting videos. I had debated buying the ContourHD 1080p Helmet Cam before my vacation but didn’t think it would arrive in time. After discovering the really fun trail at Crossings Park I decided to order one and have it shipped to my parents place. It works great and looks almost as good as the Vixia.

I ended up driving the entire 14 hours home in one day which left me a little wiped the following day. The weekend snow resulted in my two planned mountain bike rides up here being cancelled but it did give Kim and I the chance to go sledding at Rockwood Hall Park. I wanted to record some rides with my helmet cam but we ended up getting there late enough that it was to dark to record anything. It was also a lesson in proper sledding attire -

Graham Hills Park has been the best measurement of my mountain biking progress because it’s basically where I started riding and where I’ve done most of my rides. It’s also got one relentless climb that I’ve yet to do without resting, but the amount of resting has certainly gone down. There are also a number of technical sections that I used to shy away from and can now confidently ride through/across.

There’s still plenty of learn and accomplish but I’m quite happy with my progress so far.

This place is of course Mianus River Park. I’ve got to pause every time I say the name of the park, if only to collect my composure. Depending on the audience this is often followed by sentences such as:

• Mianus is actually really beautiful.
• There were a bunch of people in Mianus this weekend.
• It was actually too wet to ride in Mianus the other day.

And it’s quite true – it’s a beautiful place to ride and a lot of people (hikers, bikers, dog walkers) go there. And yes, it’s generally frowned upon to ride trails when they are muddy.

We stopped to practice a few technical parts of the trail but sadly I was not mentally prepared for them and didn’t attempt them, BUT I did have a bit of a realization about why. I find that I’m not so afraid of the hill or drop or whatever we’re attempting, but more concerned about what happens AFTER the rollover/drop. I’m afraid of what happens once I make it through the obstacle. Will I be going to fast? Will I lose control? Will I run into something else and not be ready for it?

I believe this feeling is from the fact that that’s exactly how I ended up breaking my ankle while trying to skateboard. I was pushing myself to go down a 6 foot ramp, which scared me, but ended up being alright at it. The problem was that I hurt myself after picking up too much speed from going down the ramp.

Now to move past that fear…

On Sunday I went to Cunningham Park in Queens, NY with a friend from one of my mountain biking meetup groups. It was my first time at Cunningham and I definitely would ride there a gain. No giant hills, really clear signs and lots of fun, winding single track. And it’s only about 35 minutes away.

We started off on the east side of the park and spent a good amount of time practicing on a “skinny”. Skinnies are long, narrow sections of track, often on logs or wooden boards. They can be a few inches to several feet over the ground. I managed to get across it a number of times and felt good about it, especially since a month ago I could barely get across a piece of flat wood on the ground.

I had my camera, so I once again video taped what we were doing.

Next we checked out a area of jumps and burms, but I don’t feel like I’m quite ready for jumps. It’s honestly not a primary interest of mine, but I wouldn’t mind learning how to do some jumping eventually.

After that we headed to the west side of the park where there was lots of cool, winding, jungle-like single track. On the way back out we tried the skinny a few more times and then made our way to the exit. Sushi at Mr. Wasabi in Queens topped off the evening. All in all a really good day of mountain biking.

I’m still mountain biking and still loving it. I’ve been trying to ride at least once a week. Evening rides are harder now, at least if I want to ride in the woods but I’m hoping to join a night ride later this week. I think I’ll need to pick up a better light though.

This past weekend I rode twice – once with the NYC MTB meetup group and once by myself. The Saturday ride with the group was excellent. We spent time practicing various technical bits at Sprain Ridge Park and a few of us even went for another ride afterwards. I brought my video camera and my new GorillaPod camera stand and took a bunch of footage of us.

The previous weekend I also rode with the NYC MTB group, that time in a long ride around Lewis Morris Park in Morristown, New Jersey. I really had to push myself that day, especially when I decided to go for a second loop with the group. I was definitely the slowest of the group but I managed to stay not too far behind. We did a bit of practicing on this ride as well, though not as much as this past weekend.

The weekend before that was a ride in Mianus River Park which was probably one of the best ride I’ve been on. That park is really beautiful and the guy leading the ride took us on a really nice route through Mianus. I’m glad I have it stored in my Garmin GPS.

Back in September I made the trek up to New Paltz, NY for mountain biking festival at Lake Minnewaska. I was initially disappointed because they had no single track but after seeing the following view my opinion changed completely.

And while I’m throwing all this video at your I should mention my friend Will’s new band
Gotham City Mashers. Here’s my favorite song of theirs so far:

You can see their entire recent gig at Don Hill’s:

The opener was The Anderson Council, who’s entire set I also taped:

I wanted to give this a try after seeing the map of Graham Hills that some WMBA members created via GPS. I was curious as to just how much of the park I had explored.

When my ride was over I checked iTrail and was able to post a little map of my ride at Graham to twitpic. Just by the ratio of blue lines and the area of green I could tell that I haven’t been seeing that much of the park. This explains the other day when I saw tons of cars in the parking lot but only ran into 2 people during my ride.

When I got home I looked over the export options in iTrail. One of the options was an app named TrailRunner, so I decided to give it a try.

It’s free but I’m already impressed enough that I made a donation to the developer. It has a neat little function that allows you to play back your route and you can step through it point by point as well. You can also split up your route into different sections. It also has diary and exercise tools but I’ve yet to look into those.

iTrail can also export to TrailMapping.com, so I signed up for that site as well. So far the site doesn’t seem to have much functionality beyond posting a “trip” and letting people comment on it.

Later in the evening I saw a twitter update from my friend Seth about DailyMile.com. This looks more like a site for road cyclist (and swimmers and runners) but I signed up anyways. It’s for tracking where you rode, how far, how long and how you felt during the ride. Other users can cheer you on and comment on your “workout”. You can also share photos and videos of your ride via the site. I even started a Mountain Biking group on DailyMile just to see if there are other mountain bikers on the site. Some of the discussions in forums seem to suggest so.

It’s pretty amazing that there are so many apps and web sites for these kinds of activities. There are a few others that I have tried but I’m waiting to see if I naturally use them – that lets me know if they really are good.