Parrott

Many blogs ago I wrote about my friend David and his velomobile concept. Well...after too much time, he finally came back to S.F. to visit. And he brought his sister, Sarah, along. It was an awesome several days of microbrews, cycling, and business ideas.



Here's a picture of David (in the yellow cap) in this month's critical mass.

It was pretty wet out this month, but the dedicated few were still out. We stopped afterward at bar called Gestalt. It's become a favorite Mission destination of mine because of the indoor bicycle parking and Steins of beer.

Well, it turns out that Steins of beer, wet roads, and fixed gears can be hazardous. I'm not quite sure of the sequence of events, but I ended up taking a spill on the way home and somehow didn't even react to the fall.

David and Sarah - Thanks for coming to visit! I felt like the guest the entire time.

Spanish Devil

Today, some friends (one from high school, two from college, and one from high school and college) and I rode up Mt. Diablo in the east bay. It's about a 3500 ft. climb up to the summit and almost nothing but descent on the way back. Wicked!

On a sadder note, the Wine Country Century is full. I've ridden the last couple of years and blogged about it a couple weeks ago, but registration filled up early. Too bad. However, the Grizzly Peak century located in the same neighborhood as Mt. Diablo still has spots open. The registration spots available are around 900 compared to 2,500 for the wine country century, so I imagine it'll fill up soon. Plus, I've heard it's a pretty popular ride.

Here's the link: Grizzly Peak Century

(Oh, and I remembered to sign up for this one.)

Also, I wanted to give everyone a little glimpse into my day. Here's a picture of my desk with a pile of vintage hardware. Bitchin!

Get Ready...

The weather is getting nicer. With the daylight savings, the days are getting longer. It looks like it's finally time to get out of that winter rut.

Just wanted to share a picture from yesterday's ride. My friend Tom took me up the backside of Mt. Tamalpais, and the view was awesome (the point in the background is Bolinas, a favorite surf spot).

We're starting to get into the swing of things and will be signing up for some organized rides this summer. Organized rides are a great way to get out and put some serious mileage on your bicycle and at the same time have the luxuries of support staff and pit stops. One ride that I've done the last couple of years is the Wine Country Century. It's typically a 100 mile ride in the vineyards surrounding Santa Rosa, but there are also shorter and longer variations depending on how ambitious you are. The Wine Country Century is one of the easiest of Northern California centuries, so if you're looking for a place to start, this is definitely it.

If you're looking to step it up a notch higher, it's time to look at double centuries (yes, 200 miles in one day). I've yet to do one, but it's been on my mind for the past couple of years. I am eying the Davis Double located at my Alma Mater.

Aside from cycling, I've been getting settled at my new job. Things are going really well and I'm learning a lot each day.

Hope to see you on the road!

New Job!

It's official! I am now a Systems Engineer for TVWorks, an interactive television software company owned by a joint venture between Comcast and Cox. The team that I am on is awesome and I haven't screwed up anything that isn't repairable.

So far so good. ;)

Don't forget!

No endorsements here. Just get out there and do it!

Electric What?

It's been a while since I've posted. Sorry. With all the dull weather outside and transitions in my life, it's been quite boring.

Today, however, was an exciting day.

For the past couple of years, I have been searching for an environmentally respectable way to get around. My solution has been primarily to try to get on my bicycle when the weather's nice and ride my scooter when my legs get tired. However, with wet winters, this is far from the ideal way to get around. In addition, I will be starting a new job in the north bay (more details later), so finding a car is almost a necessity.

I've looked at a variety of options over the years from biofuels to efficient compacts to hybrids to rain gear and a scooter and each looks like a considerable option. However, more recently I've been looking at electric vehicles.

I had heard several people talk about Who Killed the Electric Car and finally got my hands on it and watched. I was pretty moved by the message. It sounded like this was a pretty viable means of transportation and something that shook up the oil and automobile industries. For those that haven't seen it yet, please do.

In addition to the movie, I have had the good luck of having friends and acquaintances who are motivated to make a change. A groups of friends (one of which works for Tesla) and roommates have recently decided to pursue building an electric vehicle and today was a day full of connections.

Today, a few of us attended the monthly San Francisco Electric Vehicle Association meeting. It was great to meet some local people who are passionate about being environmentally responsible. In addition, they had some really cool electric cars from Miles Electric Vehicles available for demo. Mr. Miles, the CEO, was even in attendance to personally introduce the vehicles.






After our first SFEVA meeting, a few of us drove down to San Jose to meet with a man named Nick who built his own electric vehicle. Since he was originally trying to sell his vehicle on Craigslist, we posed as potential buyers, but as soon as he found out we were interested in building one ourselves he was eager to share his wealth of knowledge. (Thanks Nick!)

Here are a couple pictures of his setup.






So there is still much research to be done, but it is good to know that there are tons of resources out there and a community of electric vehicle enthusiasts willing to lend a helpful mind.

Stay tuned...

The meaning of Chon.

"CHON is an mnemonic acronym for the four most common elements in living organisms: carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen. These four elements are also notable for being the least massive (and having the lowest atomic number) in their group in the periodic table."

- Wikipedia

I was told it had roots in the Korean language. I'm going to have to tell my parents that we are in fact molecular, not Korean.

Congratulations Dad!

It was probably several years ago when poker started to get popular on ESPN when my father really took a liking to Texas Hold'em. Turns out he's got some skills.

Today he entered a $5 tournament on Poker Stars. Five hours later, he beat out the entire field and won a seat at his first legitimate poker tournament, the European Poker Tour German Open. Poker Stars will fly him out at the end of the month, put him up at a hotel for the week, give him some spending cash, and cover his $7,700 euro entry fee. Not too bad for $5 and five hours work.

Good luck Dad! Bring home $1,000,000!

New Year's Resolutions

A couple of years ago I made a resolution to maintain a healthier lifestyle and live more in the present instead of living for the future. The past year, instead of making any new resolutions I soft of adopted the ones from the year before and made them mantras for my life.

And how did that turn out?

I do think I lead a healthier life than years past. To be honest, college wasn't a very healthy time for me. College parties, late night cram sessions, and a terrible diet really took a toll on my body. In contrast, I have put several thousand miles on my bike each year, go for a surf when I can, and rarely drink alcohol.

For me, the difference has not been made by simply a change in attitude, but by setting distinct goals.

Two years ago, there were two significant events that triggered this change in lifestyle. I was in Alabama spending my new year's at a climbing haven and was also in the early stages of training for AIDS LifeCycle 6, a bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Being in Alabama on a trip that revolved around climbing, I realized something really important. By basing a trip around an activity, I was naturally inclined to live healthier the weeks or months leading up to the trip.

With AIDS LifeCycle 6, a trip that would demand even more physically (560 miles over 7 days), I was able to resist the temptation of late nights at the bars. Although I would still meet up with friends at bars on occasion, knowing that I was constantly in training gave me the will power to order cranberry juice instead of beer.

So with that change in place, what's the resolution for this year?

I've been reading some blogs in search of inspiration and really liked this post. I'm going to shoot for simplicity and focus. I find that 'clutter' from things piling up physically around my house to mentally in my thoughts causes a lot of distraction. I'd like to start breaking things down to the bare minimum.

And I am also learning that it is good practice to have a new year's resolution for your blog as well. Sometimes I feel that my blog can be anything and everything depending on the particular day and would like to simplify and focus my blog as well. For me, the blogs I enjoy reading the most are the ones that are consistent with their topics and motivate me to 'do'. Some topics that I am interested in and would like to write about are small business, web technology, and practical ways to staying in shape. So keep posted!

Velomobile

This past semester I have been taking a course in entrepreneurship at the city college and tonight I give my final presentation. The main task we have been working on all semester has been to pick a business idea and turn it into a viable business plan. The presentation is supposed to mimic what we would tell investors or lenders.

Starting the class I had a whole list of ideas. The ideas ranged from importing custom suits from China to launching a video surveillance forum to manufacturing a modified recumbent bicycle. Each idea was sparked by conversations I've had in the past with family and friends, so in essence each business plan already had a partner in place.

The idea I ultimately chose to nurture was a vehicle designed by a good friend of mine, David Parrott. David is an industrial designer with a pretty killer track record. He has worked for some very respectable companies and is sort of a Dr. Frankenstein if you will. Not only does he come up with some brilliant ideas, but he's the type to really dive into an idea and make it a reality. His resume says, "fabrication in ALL materials," and he really means it.

The proposed business is manufacturing velomobiles. A velomobile is a combination of a recumbent bicycle, an aerodynamic shell (fairing), and a motor. The idea is not completely new, as they are gaining popularity in Europe, but it is something that isn't hugely popular in the US...yet.

David's design can be seen by visiting his site and viewing the 'Capstone' project in his portfolio.

David is currently taking graduate courses and working on his design for his thesis, so the timeline for this project is a little ways out. In the meantime, we will be working on refining the business plan and plan to field test his designs in March by riding from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco.

So look out for us on the road and for velomobiles in your neigborhood!

Two Left Feet

...well more like two right sleeves.

Tonight I was out and about. I had plans with my girlfriend, Kate, to go to a holiday/birthday party. I put on a nice shirt, some jeans, and sneakers and was off.

When I say nice shirt, I mean something with a collar. This particular shirt I bought at Ross. And I'm sure it said 'irregular' or something to that nature, but I'm usually one to ignore the little details.

As it turns out, I noticed something strangely odd about my shirt. Looking at my right sleeve, then my left, and then my right again; something seemed a bit out of place. Staring for a few more moments, I noticed that I had two right sleeves. Yes, that's right! Two right sleeves!

Guess there was something irregular about that shirt. The funny thing though is that I've had the shirt for months and have never noticed. And what's more, it probably won't stop me from wearing it again.

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

For quite some time now, I have been following all the hype of application frameworks. The analogy is that if a programming language were clay, an application framework would be the tools needed to mold that clay into something beautiful. Of course you could make something beautiful with your bare hands alone, but the tools aim to help speed the process.

From what I have been gathering, Ruby on Rails is the framework of frameworks. For a proper introduction, visit the official site. Ruby is a scripting language that was largely influenced by Perl. I have read that the name Ruby comes from the birth stone of July as Perl (Pearl) is the birth stone of June. No one seems to claim they know for sure, but it is a popular theory. Ruby has been around for some ten years, but it wasn't until about three years ago with the release of Ruby on Rails that the movement behind Ruby really gained momentum.

When I first saw Ruby, I was a bit confused to be honest. In retrospect, when I saw my first programming language, I was a bit confused. Ruby appears to be a very elegant language. It is purely object oriented, which I won't discuss now, and can almost be read like a sentence.

The Rails aspect, is even more intriguing. The framework has loads of features built right into it, making development as easy as typing in a few commands and filling in the blanks. But what I think is the most fascinating thing about Rails is it's dominance. I don't think the Ruby programming language was even in the top ten programming languages until Ruby on Rails came along. Additionally, it is THE framework for Ruby and has inspired a handful of frameworks in other languages.

Speaking frameworks in other languages, I have investigated a few PHP frameworks. I was hoping to get similar functionality of Ruby on Rails, but still be able to code in PHP (which I feel more comfortable in). A couple that share similarities to Ruby on Rails and are fairly easy to get up and running are CakePHP and Code Igniter. But still, they have a long ways to go to catch Ruby on Rails.

This leaves me with an interesting scenario. Do I dig deeper into Ruby so I can learn more Rails or do I try to navigate through all the documentation for a PHP framework and lose some of the cool features of Rails? I've scoured internet forums for answers and there are people on both sides of the fence. Not an easy decision if you ask me.

California Bonzing

Just wanted to shout out on behalf of California Bonzing. A friend of mine and ex-roomie, Austin, is a videographer and puts together clips of skateboarding and scenic California backdrops. His style is quite a bit different than your typical skate video. The analogy would go something like this.

California Bonzing's style to skateboard culture is like longboarding to surfing. It's about the style. It's about the lifestyle.

So check it out already!

California Bonzing video!

Oh, by the way...recognize the voice? Does anyone sense a career in voice overs?

Scrub it with AJAX

AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript and XML

Not sure if that means anything to you. Have you ever been to a web site, clicked something, and lo and behold the something magically changed right before your eyes? That magic is AJAX (or Flash depending on the site).

I won't get into the technicalities in this post, but rather point you in the direction of some resources I found useful.

Scriptaculous
This is probably the most popular AJAX/Javascript library right now. I'm making this assumption based on the number of people that have bookmarked the site on Del.icio.us. At this moment, there are 26,125 other people who have this site bookmarked. The closest AJAX library (in my bookmarks) is jQuery with 12,476.

Scriptaculous is built on another popular library, Prototype and has a strong following, I believe, because it is native in Ruby on Rails.

It's fairly straight forward to implement. The Scriptaculous site has a bunch of docs and demos on their site, but I'm a really big fan of video tutorials. If you're looking for an easy introduction to AJAX, check out this link.

After watching the video, I found it pretty straight forward to integrate AJAX into my blog

Thanks again!

Count your chips and cache them in!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that caching wasn't super difficult to implement. I found this article on caching and knew that sooner or later I would have to implement it into my blog page.

What is caching?

To put it simply, caching makes websites perform faster and there are two ways (that I know of) that caching works.

Method 1. This is the caching that most people think of when they think of caching. Our internet browsers will save little snippets of web pages to be used if we return to a page. Because retrieving information from the internet is a lot slower than retrieving information from our hard drive or RAM, saving information locally will speed up sites we often visit.

Method 2. This is the method that I used for speeding up my site. The blog page of my site retrieves information from my Blogger account and then dynamically creates the HTML to be displayed. In plain English, my site was a greedy pig. If two people were to visit the same page, the server could not remember that a page had already been visited, thus it would recreate the page from scratch.

The solution. Caching, obviously. Now the second person that visits the page has the convenience of visiting a page that has already been generated and is less of a wait.

The savings. I was surprised how much time maybe 20 lines of code or so saved. It was taking some pages *gasp* almost 10 seconds to render. After the page has been cached, it's fractions of hundreths of seconds.

Now on to the fun stuff. Look out AJAX!!!

If your page is greedy and you're using PHP, I'd suggest taking a gander at the article.

Poor Scooty!

Hopefully you'll get a kick out of this one...

Last week I lost the only key to my scooter. For those of you that don't know my scooter, it's a beat up black 2001 Vespa with a red heart spray painted on the side. Her name is Weezy and she was the way she is when I bought her used about six months ago.

So the story goes...

Last week after class, I lost the key. And I know for sure it's in the house somewhere. I know this because I rode my scooter home and couldn't find the key before leaving the next day.

So it's been driving me crazy. If I would have lost it while I was out, I would have already come to peace with the key being gone, but since I know it's somewhere in the house I find myself as sort of a obsessive compulsive when doing anything at home.

I sorted through the trash before throwing it out. I shook all of my shoes thinking maybe it had fallen into one. I did a thorough cleaning of my room twice with no luck. I even pulled the washer out of the closet thinking maybe it had fallen through the cracks. Seriously, who pulls their washer out?

I may soon come to the fact that I just need to replace the key and all of the locks, but I know that once I do, that damn key will show up.

XHTML

XHTML = XML + HTML

Today I made my site XHTML compliant using this great validator tool from the World Wide Web Consortium. They're the reason why you can view and use the same site in Windows, Apple, Linux, etc. They call this interoperability, or the ability of a site or program to be cross compatible. This is why web applications have such a bright future.

Because of these standards, developers can focus more of their time on application features as opposed to compatibility with multiple systems. For example, GMail works on pretty much anything. Outlook, doesn't. And I imagine plenty of resources go into the development of Outlook, but since a lot of Microsoft's technology is proprietary as opposed to open source I imagine it's very difficult to create platforms that support their software. (If that's at all what Microsoft wants.)

Of course this really alters the business model, but that can be a topic of a totally different post.

So what does my site being XHTML complaint have to do with anything?

Nothing really. Someone could probably mine the data from my site, and I do get put a cool badge at the bottom of my page!

** Some of my blog pages are not XHTML compliant. This is because I am getting my content from a different site that isn't XHTML complaint. I'll probably get around to writing a script to fix that, but that opens a whole can of worms. I'll probably need to start thinking about caching my pages at some point as the page is slow enough already with all of the data transfer from Blogger to my site.

Flickr Rocks!

Come take a look at my pictures. I've had all these pictures over the years stored on my hard drive and am finally getting around to posting them on flickr. What's really cool about flickr (for the few of you that haven't used it yet) is that it behaves like a program, but is actually a website. This is a lot of the drive behind the Web2.0 movement. You may have heard of things like "web applications" and "software as a service." This is a great example of what that is.

So check out my photos already!

My gallery on my webpage.
My gallery on flickr.

It has definitely been a stroll down memory lane. Some of these pictures I haven't looked at in ages. And they brought a smile to my face.

IE Rant

So I was designing my site in Firefox and on Ubuntu thinking the beautiful things I was creating were universal. Then after hours of design, I went to have dinner with my parents and I was excited to show off my progress...and it looked like crap.

My mom runs Windows XP in 800x600 resolution and at 8-bits of color. It was almost like going back in time to Windows 98, but it really made me realize that I need to consider all configurations when designing my site. Especially since the majority of people surfing the net still use IE.

Things that were supposed to be transparent weren't. Menus were lost. Divs didn't line up. It was a disaster.

So I went home and booted up my old Windows machine (guess it's still good for something). I quickly looked up some fixes, applied them, and used my Windows machine to verify.

I guess the moral of the story is: hang on to your Windows machine...at least until everyone else wises up. :)

I love paisley!

I decided a while back that my site design sucked. I finally had some time where I could really get into the nuts and bolts of my site design. So I had a go.

I really wanted the site to look like a piece of paper on a backdrop, desk, wallpaper, etc. And I also wanted it to have a sort of drop shadow effect to give it an element of depth.

Played around with a few backdrops, but ultimately I decided upon paisley. I love paisley.

Check it out at www.seanchon.com!