Today was a tough ride. After not having ridden over 9000 ft. ever until two weeks ago, I rode the out-and-back Kenosha Pass to Georgia Pass ride for the first time, topping out at 11,800 ft. Very painful, especially on the climbs on the way back to Kenosha. I thought I was in shape, but I was humbled.

My MTB ride in Breckenridge to check out Loop 2 of the Breckenridge 100 is now in the books. It was tough, but rewarding. 33+ miles, 5:45hrs on the bike, and climbing above 11,200ft. twice.

My new Yeti ASR 5 did it’s job nicely, albeit with a new layer of dust and plenty of little creaks that I’ll need to wash out. I adjusted the rebound on the Fox F120 RLC FIT 15 after a frustrating ride up the rocks at Deer Creek Canyon on Friday and it’s much tamer now on the rocky climbs.

So with my new extra awesome bike, new found confidence, and an understanding wife, I’m branching out of my comfort zone and doing a true hardcore (by my standards) ride this weekend – Loop 2 of the upcoming Breckenridge 100. Up to now, I’ve mostly limited myself to the familiar rides in the Denver Foothills, and weekend rides at Buffalo Creek. Now I get to see if I can handle the stuff above 11,000 ft. It’s gonna be interesting to see if my body and brain can handle the extra 2 hours of riding and 1000 ft. of climbing beyond what I’m used to.

Since starting a new job in December, I’ve returned to Coldfusion for web development and have adopted the CFWheels framework. Having found a PHP framework that I really liked in Codeigniter, I wanted to find something similar for CF. Fusebox just didn’t cut it. CFWheels was the closest thing I could find to Codeigniter:

• It utilizes CFCs for Controllers and Models in the way that Codeigniter uses classes.
• It comes with some very helpful “helpers” for all kinds of things including redirects, “flash” (no, not that kind) messages, and HTML display code.
• The online documentation is thorough and easy to navigate.

It’s missing a few things that I liked in Codeigniter, like being able create a query object once that’s available throughout a controller, but it’s only up to version 1.0.5 as of this writing, so I expect great things in the future.

Last week I purchased a Yeti ASR 5 from the Singletrack Factory in Denver. I was going to wait until next year to replace my 5-year old Cannondale Scalpel, but then my brother bought an ASR 5 and my original plan fell apart quickly. As soon as I moved to Denver from Indianapolis 3 years ago, I knew that the Scalpel wasn’t really suited for my riding along the Front Range. I’m old, I don’t race, and I needed more travel in back. But I waited patiently (until last week) to make a change.

Specs:

• Suspension:F120 RLC FIT 15
• Headset: Cane Creek S-3
• Crankset:Stylo 3.3 44-32-22
• Front Der:SRAM X7
• Rear Der:SRAM X9
• Shifters:SRAM X7K
• Cassette:SRAM PG970 11-34
• Chain:Shimano 116 links
• Wheels:Stans ZTR Olympic UST
• Tires:Continental Mountain King 2.2 Tubeless
• Brakes/Levers:Shimano M575 / 160 rotors
• Handlebar:Stylo
• Stem:Truvativ AKA
• Grips:Yeti Lock-on
• Saddle:Fizik Plateau
• Seatpost:Truvativ Hussefelt

So I guess I better start using this blog for something. Don’t want that $8 per year to GoDaddy for the domain to go to waste!

I decide to purchase a new Airport Extreme Wireless N/Gigabit ethernet router to increase the speed of my home network and increase my mac-ness. It’s expensive ($179 retail), but on the surface it has great specs (N, Gigabit, USB for hard drives and printers). However, it’s far from perfect.

I have a number of hardwired devices in my home network (PS3, 2 DirecTV HD boxes, a WinXP homebrew “media server”, and my Macbook Pro most of the time). I had purchased a couple of Netgear gigabit switches in anticipation of going full 1000Mbps at some point. I was also using an old G4 400Mhz Gigabit Mac tower solely as a print and file server. The Airport Extreme would allow me to complete the 1000Mbps network, handle the print and file server duties, and add wireless N for the Macbook Pro as a bonus.

After some stupid moves on my part that delayed getting the network up and running with the Airport Extreme, I got my Actiontec GT701 DSL modem/router configured for PPPOE and set up the Airport to log in to my DSL provider, allocate DHCP addresses, and create a wireless network. The problem is that EVERYTIME you click “update” to make a configuration change – even as minor as changing the status light from always on to “flash on activity” requires a reboot that takes FOREVER. With my old Linksys router, it had to be something major to require a reboot.

The other thing that really bugs me is that everytime you load the Airport Utility, it starts out wanting to run a setup wizard. You have to choose “manual setup” first before proceeding.

That’s not the end of it. The first time I attached a USB hard drive to the Airport, I could see and browse without any problems. However, after several update/reboots, neither that drive or another I tried would show up anywhere other than in the Airport Utility. I was ready to throw in the towel before deciding to reformat one of the drives as Apple OS Extended to see if that made a difference and it did. I then reformatted my Time Machine drive and attached it as well and it worked to. It took all night to do the initial backup (I should have done that before attaching to the Airport), but it’s working.

So in spite of the initial issues I’ve had, I’ve achieved everything I wanted and then some with the Airport Extreme. I would even consider attaching the external drive I use for iPhoto and iTunes to the Airport except that I don’t think Time Machine would back it up if I did.

I’m a defender of most things Mac. I love my Macbook Pro and my iPhone 3G. However, my patience is wearing thin with Apple and it’s handling of updates and features that loyal owners have pleaded for since the release of both the 1st generation and 2nd generation phones.

Push Notification
This is the big one. Push Notification is supposed to allow background notifications of events like new Twitter messages, IMs, eBay bid updates, Facebook status updates, etc. Apple announced it would be available by September 2008. It’s still not here, but the worst part is that Apple has not said a freaking word about where it stands – for all we know, it’s been shelved. How can something this big, affecting millions of customers, and being offered by a publicy-traded company not be discussed by the company after a four month delay?

Video
Video recording for the iPhone has been around awhile. Qik has been running on jailbroken iPhones for months and there have been rumors that it was coming to the App Store for a while. So where is it? Why do we even have to rely on a third-party solution to handle something while the company that makes the phone is itself a giant in video media (Quicktime, Final Cut Pro, iMovie, video editing studios everywhere).

The Rest

• Cut & Paste – I’m not all that worked up over cut & paste, but a lot of people are.
• Running 3rd party GPS apps without the display being on. This is a big battery hog and a pain in the ass.
• GPS apps with LOCALLY STORED MAPS. It’s ridiculous to expect that we’ll always have data access thru the cell network whenever we want/need to access GPS.

I’ve been avoiding jailbreaking the phone in order to get Qik and some semblance of background notifictions, but I’ve about reached the end of my rope.