Monthly Archives: October 2015

Bicycling

Cycling to 70 — and Beyond

For the past three years, we’ve been documenting our bicycling adventures with video clips from a handle-bar-mounted GoPro, and lots of still photos.  And, an adventure it has been.  Bicycle touring and recreational riding has become a popular activity for the senior set in the 21st century, so we are not unique, and certainly not the accomplished athletes that some are even into their 80s.  And, other survivors of heart disease have taken up bicycling as part of their rehabilitation, so our story is just one of many.

I’ve taken the 90-some short videos we’ve published over the years and put together clips from selected ones to tell the story, in less than an hour, of how we trained for a self-contained, unsupported bicycle tour on our own, through Michigan, the Upper Peninsula, and northern Wisconsin in 2013 and the setbacks we encountered with a life-threatening disease and the ensuing open heart surgery, followed by a pulmonary embolism that required a year of blood thinner therapy that led to a kidney problem.  After all that, with aggressively active walks and stationary bicycle training, we recovered enough to enjoy a limited bicycling season, combining car travel with trail riding.

So it goes: what follows are two 30-minute videos, the first covering our 2013 tour and preparations, and the second covering the realization that fitness and health aren’t the same thing, and the long trek back to fitness after surgery, rewarded with walks on scenic hiking trails around our local area and  fun rides on really great trails across the country.  The films are a celebration of the joy of bicycling as a life-long activity and the realization that modern medical intervention can not only save your life, but help you live it fully, if you have the determination and resolve to seize the day and take charge of your rehabilitation.

The early videos were fairly shaky, due to the instability of the camera mount.  The YouTube stabilization feature was worse, so it is what it is.  There is a bit of voice-over narration in the beginning of each film, but mostly we let the scenery and the rides speak for themselves, along with the music downloaded from freemusicarchive.org.  If you have the bandwidth, watch them in full-screen mode and turn up the volume.

These videos are on YouTube, which allows longer videos. The originals and others, taken along the trails and scenic byways of western Washington, can be found on Vimeo, at https://vimeo.com/user10747705

Maps, statistics, and elevation profiles of the routes shown in these videos can be found on RideWithGPS, at  http://ridewithgps.com/users/59643

All things Unix

Windows 10 Arrives at Last: Be Careful What You Wish For

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The only reason we keep a copy of Microsoft Windows at Chaos Central is to run “must have” programs that are only published on the Microsoft platform (and, sometimes, OS/X, for which we don’t have a reliable machine).  Today was one of those days…  We have been getting warnings for some time about updating the GPS in our car.  We have avoided doing that because, until we got the refurbished Windows machine, we had to fire up XP in a virtual machine on Linux and assign a USB port to it.  Except, Garmin no longer supports Garmin Express on Windows XP.

I switched the big monitor from external display on my Linux laptop to the Windows 7 box and plugged in the GPS.  Of course, Garmin Express couldn’t find the GPS.  This is usually some Windows setting, but annoying to have to wade through the manual hardware detection.  Meanwhile, the Windows 10 upgrade agent, which, up until now, had steadfastly insisted we needed to buy a new machine, decided that the Nvidia graphics card I installed back in August was really present and functional, and started the upgrade, which pretty much put doing any useful work on hold until it completed.

But, while it was downloading, I was also downloading the Garmin utility, fighting with Firefox, which had caught an adware virus during configuration of the new machine.  As most Windows users are aware, adware viruses flood the screen with bogus warnings insisting you immediately purchase protective software to prevent the very thing it is doing, and will undoubtedly scale up the infection if you accept.  Other ads a flood in, opening new tabs and windows unbidden, faster than you can close them, if indeed you can close them safely.  So, I also downloaded an adware cleaner (???) but couldn’t run it while the Microsoft update was running.

By the way, none of this ever happens on Linux–adware and viruses just don’t happen.  yes, there are attacks that might install rootkits to allow unauthorized use of the machine, but these are relatively easy to avoid with good administrative practices, but rarely would a program be able to take over the machine or alter the operation of an existing program.

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Soon, the machine completed downloading and preparing the upgrade, then started the process, during which the machine is unavailable. After a fairly long time, involving multiple reboots, the configuration process started, with a succession of “friendly” messages, along with the admonition to not turn of the machine (or, by inference, unplug it, and hope the power company doesn’t have an outage).

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All this waiting is tedious, but the messages are hopeful, and then, after a while, refreshingly honest…  The admonition to not turn off the machine might indicate the upgrade process is not idempotent, i.e., that it might not succeed if restarted, a scary thought.  This one feature of Windows makes me extremely reluctant to ever consider using a Windows mobile system, on battery, or Windows anywhere without uninterruptible power.

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Finally, the new system is ready for use, and detects the GPS immediately.  As much as I have denounced Microsoft and Windows over the years, I was as hopeful about moving from Windows XP to Windows 10 as I was about moving to Windows NT from Windows 3.1 back in the 1990s (NT was a “real” operating system; Windows 3.1 was a graphical user interface running on top of MS-DOS).  For the record, I had abandoned Windows 3.1 for IBM’s OS/2 (another “real” operating system, but which ran Windows 3 programs) early on, and had been a dedicated Unix user since MS-DOS 5 and  Windows 2.

Windows XP seemed an improvement over NT and 2000, which explains why it persists after 13 years, during which the embarrassingly dysfunctional Windows Vista spawned Windows 7, which was essentially Vista with an updated XP desktop, followed by the baffling Windows 8, which replaced the old desktop metaphor with a giant phone screen that didn’t make phone calls, with the tools locked in a secret compartment in the trunk, under the spare tire and the “Desktop” tiled with large “buttons” titled with incomprehensible icons. According to users (I never did use it), in operation, it was permanently wired in the “parental consent required” mode in a largely ineffective attempt to prevent users from inadvertently inviting malware into their systems.  The core system is still vulnerable to intrusion, and the monolithic application architecture is statistically prone to code bugs from sheer volume of code. (Unix architecture encourages a building-block approach to programming, leveraging existing bug-free code.)

The Windows 10 preview, released over a year ago, seemed to have promise: a fairly responsive system with a reasonable work surface modeled after the venerable desktop but with some updated graphics. Well, OK, usable–when you absolutely have to use it, but still Microsoft Windows. Still, Microsoft, under new leadership, (Nidella, replacing corporate plank owner Ballmer as CEO, represents a second generation of management, 35 years after the founding of the company), seems on the mend from a decade of missteps in their flagship operating system. Even though the usability factor seems improved, the cumbersome design concept legacy leaves the platform still more vulnerable to malware than the rival systems based on Unix system design principles, Apple’s OS/X on the desktop, and the Open Source GNU/Linux in the server room.

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Microsoft’s next target is the computer in everyone’s pocket, the smart phone, but struggling from behind against Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms, the former based on the tried-and-true Apple desktop model and the latter built on the GNU/Linux core. Meanwhile, here we are, finally able to refresh our GPS maps on the Garmin (based, naturally, on GNU/Linux). Time to switch the display real estate back to Linux and get some work done.