I spent only 16 nights outside in 2025–far fewer than in past years. I did more non-camping traveling (Mexico, New Mexico, Toronto, Morocco, San Francisco), and I was unemployed for most of the first half of the year (which seems like it would allow for more trips–but with constant interviewing and a limited budget, it didn’t work out that way). 🚲 January 25-26: Ninham Mountain Josh trying to…
I figure I have to post these roundups for one year sometime during the next year–after that, it’s too late. This time, with three days let in 2025, it looks like I’m going to make it by the skin of my teeth. I spent 21 nights outside in 2024. 🚲 December 31-January 1: NYE at Roosa Gap Yes, I’m counting this twice (for 2023 and 2024). 🚲 January 13-14: RPH Shelter Famously, you can order pizza…
In Ling Ma’s novel Severance , the fictional Shen Fever creates in its victims a compulsion for mindless repetition. They lose themselves in the return to old routines. But for me in recent years, return and repetition have come to feel generative. To return to something familiar and see it in a new way feels like a gift. It’s a way of catching a glimpse of your changing self reflected back to…
I spent a bit over 30 nights outside in 2023. 🚲 January 21-22: Ferncliff Forest A few of us rode to Ferncliff Forest from Pawling; M– drove and met us there. I was chased by an elderly gun enthusiast through the old Harlem Valley Psychiatric Center campus, more recently used by the cult front organization Olivet University until it was shut down by the state for its many criminal activities.…
Ever since my 2018 tour , I’ve been itching to get back to Vermont. Last Labor Day weekend I rode Joe Cruz’s Roundabout Battleboro route over three days with my friend Chris, and it only whetted my appetite for more. I dreamed of doing Cruz’s longer gravel route: the VTXL , which stretches the length of the Green Mountain State, from the Canadian border in the remote Northeast Kingdom to the…
After posting about all of my camping trips in 2019 , I skipped that ritual last year. But today I sat down and did the exercise again. In 2021, I spent 31 32 nights outside (if I’m counting correctly)–fewer than in 2020, more than in 2019. (Maybe at some point I’ll go back and post about all of those 2020 trips.) 2022-01-03: Edited to add a last-minute New Year’s Eve trip! 🥾 December 31-January…
In October I bought a thirdhand Crust Romanceur–my first bike with clearance for big tires (I’m running 650bx48s), my first bike with disc brakes, my first bike set up tubeless. Naturally, I started looking for off-road routes I wouldn’t have been able to ride on my old skinny-tire bike. With the holidays it’s been hard to find time for trips, but on the weekend of January 11-12 I set out for a…
It’s hard to be sure, but I think I probably spent more nights outside last year than any other (though my total is still modest and I hope to spend more time camping this year). I’ve written some of these trips up here, but I haven’t been as consistent about it as I’d like to have been. So below I will at least briefly touch on each outing. March 9-10 There was no snow on this road the day before…
(As is apparently my habit, I didn’t complete this blog post until many months after the fact. The trip described below took place July 21-25, 2019.) This short tour came together at the last minute. M– was leaving town for a few days so I’d figured it was a good time for a bike trip, and arranged to take the week off at work a couple months before. Then suddenly that week was only days away and I…
Ferncliff Forest observation tower Since a snowy trip to Vernooy Falls last month, I’d been looking forward to NYC Adventure Cycling’s last trip of the year , to Harriman. But last Saturday morning, when I rode out to meet the group, the weather was nastier than predicted–cold, steady rain, with colder and heavier rain predicted. This is my least favorite weather for camping, and I wasn’t really…
(Note: this is the first of two planned posts about this trip. In this post, I’ll describe my route and the events of each day of the tour; in a followup post, I’ll discuss some of my gear—especially gear I haven’t used before—and how it worked on the road.) Last fall I visited Northampton, Massachussetts for work. Because I’m a train guy, I took the Amtrak Vermonter . Because I’m a bike guy, I…
At 6:00 AM Saturday I started the Long Island Randonneurs’ Bethpage 300k–my first 300k, and my longest-ever ride. I managed to finish a bit after midnight. I did not do a great job of preparing for this ride. I hadn’t ridden much since the 200k in June: one 87-mile ride and a lot of puttering around the city. I tried to ensure that I’d sleep well in the week before the ride, avoiding alcohol…
After my last 200k ride , I swore I’d never do something so stupid again, and then a couple days later I signed up for the Long Island Randonneurs’ Ronkonkoma 200k . This was my first true mass-start brevet (I’m not counting April’s populaire ) and my third ride of this length. The field was quite large (I believe over 40 riders; RBA Steve Yesko said this was the most they’d ever had) and included…
It’s been almost three years since my last 200k ride –apparently that’s how long it takes me to forget just how much riding that is. Having thus forgotten, and feeling unduly emboldened after riding the Jones Beach Populaire last month, I signed up for George Swain’s Keep the River on your Right permanent , along with J.D. (a fellow populaire rider). His friend Jamie accompanied us informally.…
I’ve enjoyed my last few bike-camping trips with 718 Cyclery and the NYC Adventure Cycling Club, but I hadn’t done a solo trip for what felt like a long time. I’d missed the feeling of being out in the woods by myself: reading by the fire, feeling the quiet settle in. So when a weather window coincided with a free weekend, I packed my gear for another overnight at Peekamoose in the Sundown Wild…
Yesterday I rode my second-ever RUSA-sanctioned ride (after the Fox Valley Permanent ), and my first with other riders: the Long Island Randonneurs ’ Jones Beach Populaire . The ride was held the same day as the New Jersey Randonneurs ’ Cranbury 200k, which seems to have drawn most of the more experienced crowd with the result that our group was comprised largely of new randonneurs. (One notable…
Recently The Outline published a piece on Computer People for Peace, a 1960s-1970s activist group originating in New York but with numerous chapters nationally. Some folks from the Tech Workers’ Coalition were looking for someone near one of the libraries which hold copies of the CPP’s newsletter Interrupt to scan them, and as the Tamiment at NYU is one of those libraries, I spent last Friday…
The past weekend there were two groups organizing bike overnights out of New York: 718 Cyclery’s Mountain Lakes Park microtour and NYC Adventure Cycling Club’s ride to Fahnestock State Park . I vacillated until the last possible moment but ended up riding with the Adventure Cycling folks because I am lazy and their starting point was closer to my apartment (at the Queens entrance to the Queensboro…
For the past few years I’ve used Flickr to host most of the photos for this site, with the help of Christian Nunciato’s jekyll-flickr plugin . But with Flickr on life support as Yahoo circles the drain, I’ve been looking for an alternative. I’ve even considered rolling my own. But this weekend I stumbled across rokka.io , and I’m using it for my photo hosting as of today. Rationale I had two main…
Since I moved to Queens I’ve been trying to get back into the habit of taking the train to ride my bike in interesting places as I did when I lived in Chicago ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 ). Some of my attempts ( Greenwich to Peekskill ) have been more successful than others ( Greenwich to Bridgeport to New Haven ) but I always enjoy finding new roads. And since I did some exploring in the mid-Hudson while I…
M– left for her run this morning, and texted me a few minutes later: “They’re doing cyclocross at the park by Costco.” This is how I learned that the only cross racing in New York City happens blocks from my apartment. Of course I had to head over and have a look. This was only the second cross race I’ve attended (the first being the racing at Montrose Beach in Chicago several years ago) but it’s…
This post is now several months old because I’ve been both busy and lazy, but I’m posting it belatedly as I try to work through my backlog of subject matter. When I signed up for 718 Cyclery ’s annual Catskills tour we hadn’t nailed down a date for our move from Newburgh to Queens–in the event, I left on our third day in the new apartment, leaving a very understanding M– alone with piles of boxes.…
When writing tests, I’ve often simulated Postgres using in-memory Java SQL databases like HSQL or H2 . In general this has been a frustrating experience. While both have modes which purport to offer syntax compatibility with Postgres, neither has true feature parity, and it’s always a struggle to “test what you fly.” So you can imagine how excited I was to discover just how easy it is to embed 1 a…
I took a nicely chilly ride today up to the Mid-Hudson Bridge, across, and back down the east side of the Hudson. Pretty sure I saw a nice blue Zanconato on River Road just south of Marlboro. I broke the Sigma 30mm f2.8 lens that has been my go-to for my Sony NEX-5N, and I wasn’t feeling the phone camera today, so I dug out one of my old eBayed manual-focus lenses, the Industar 55mm f2.8 from the…
Last weekend, with M– in the city visiting friends, I took my first overnight bike trip in New York, to the Peekamoose campground in the Catskills. (M– and I camped there by car a few weeks ago.) Saturday The Velo Orange Randonneur in mullet-bike mode: rando in the front, bikepacking in the back The ride started on an inauspicious note when I decided a few miles out that it was chillier than I’d…
#weshutitdown
Ever since John at Uptown Bikes mentioned that the campgrounds in Wisconsin’s Kettle Moraine State Forest are within striking distance of the Harvard Metra stop–in my mind I’d always imagined they were much further–I’ve been wanting to make the trip. This weekend (the last before we leave the country for two weeks) was forecast to be unseasonably warm and sunny and M– and I had planned a trip to…
A few weeks ago, while I was at a movie, some reprobate stole off of my trusty vintage Centurion city bike my seatpost, saddle (a nicely-worn-in Brooks B17), and worst of all, my beloved Acorn medium saddlebag . Acorn bags probably better-known by reputation than by direct experience, since it is a bit of a pain to actually buy one. These bags are made one at a time by a couple in California; they…
Dacy Airport on the way out of Harvard, Illinois Last summer M– and I took a rushed trip to Sugar River Forest Preserve in a rental car, and all this summer I’ve been scheming to get back–this time by bike. In July my first attempt went comically awry. M– had planned to join me but bailed when the forecast showed record heat and humidity in combination with a chance of heavy rain. Like a fool, I…
A breezy day on Geneva Lake Yesterday I took advantage of the unseasonably mild weather to ride from Harvard–the northernmost stop on the Metra UP-NW line–to Kenosha–the northernmost stop on the UP-N line. It’s a ride I’ve wanted to do for a while, but I’ve always had difficulty settling on a route. In the event I followed this route , more or less–Harvard to Lake Geneva to Burlington to Kenosha.…
Yesterday we caught the first UP-NW northbound to Harvard at 8:48 AM at Jefferson Park–a run I’ve begun calling the Rando Express due to the proliferation of shiny fenders and boxy front bags on this first train of the weekend to the ferticle cycling-grounds of rural north-central Illinois. On this ride we shared a car with a pair of Madison-bound cyclists and admired the Swift Ozette bag one of…
I’ve really come to enjoy the practice of regular, scheduled skill-sharing sessions among distributed teams. At Outpace, where I first encountered these sessions, they were dubbed “Learn You A Thing,” and the topics ranged from Pixie internals to core.async to Montessori schooling to advanced Excel-fu (this last from the a member of the business team). At my current employer, we’re working to…
--> Alarm clocks, like automobiles, are mechanical devices which bring me no pleasure and thus I do what I can to avoid them in my daily existence. – Kent Peterson I share Kent Peterson’s opinion of alarm clocks but not his ability to wake myself in the small hours, so it was to the dissonant squawk of my phone’s alarm that I awoke yesterday at 4:30–a time which would let me eat a decent breakfast…
For the first time this year the Forest Preserve District of Cook County is allowing camping in the Shabbona Woods forest preseve –and, eventually, four other locations within the forest preserve system. I’ve been anticipating this for a while, so M– and I decided to make this our destination for our (belated) first bike-camping trip of this season–I on my new-to-me Velo Orange Randonneur and she…
I find myself more and more eager to get out of the city these days to ride. And since there’s only so many times you can head up Sheridan Road, that has meant lots of Metra rides. Last week I rode out-and-back north from the Crystal Lake station to Richmond near the Wisconsin border along McHenry County’s Prairie Trail. But while I was waiting for the train home a local told me that next time I…
I’m just back from lovely Portland (my first visit since 2005–damn, has it been that long?), where I attended Clojure/West 2015 –my first Clojure conference. It’s been a wonderful experience thanks to the speakers and organizers, but also to the half-dozen or more of my fellow former Outpacers with whom I was able to catch up. Below I’ve described a few of the talks that stood out to me. (There…
I came to 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 cold, having never heard of it until its arresting dust jacket caught my eye at my neighborhood feminist bookstore , in a bit of precisely that serendipity the loss of which the partisans of the printed word are always decrying. In this case they have a point. I doubt I’d have come across this book without the bookstore taking a chance and stocking…
Core Offer Engine team stickers featuring our Trello icons, designed by Jessica Kerr On Thursday Outpace Systems laid off two-thirds of its development team (including me). It was a sad day for me, because the engineering culture at Outpace was really something special, and I’ll miss it. What made Outpace unique was the full-time remote pairing. What made it work was the incredible quality of the…
One of the great things about the “ better is better ” 1 ethos in the Common Lisp community is that it’s given rise to a culture of very good tools. For example, most implementations extend trace in interesting ways . In particular, SBCL provides a number of useful options which I’ve missed when working in Clojure. (There are a number of tools in this space for Clojure, most notably…
It’s been a year and a half since I found this wonderful porteur rack (on Craigslist, for a song), and the only thing wrong with it is that Cetma (which is a guy named Lane Kagay in California) doesn’t make them anymore. He now sells a 5-rail version , with a platform 11″ square (versus 11″ × 17″ on my 7-rail). The 5-rail is probably just as useful as the 7-rail for most of the things you’d want…
A couple of weeks ago Streetsblog Chicago published a very affecting essay by Olatunji Oboi Reed: Why I Fight: How Biking Saved My Life and Can Help Other Black Chicagoans . (As it turned out, this was the last long article published by the site before it went dormant for lack of funds.) In it, Reed talks about his experience with depression, how biking helped him to find a way to get better, and…
Last fall my solo overnight along the I&M Canal Trail had a somewhat disastrous conclusion, when I lost my eyeglasses and had difficulty working for the month or so it took to have them replaced. But I enjoyed it nonetheless, and M— was interested in reprising the trip with me. This time, we would set a very moderate pace, to allow for plenty of time at camp and in town along the way. We would…
Inspired by Let’s Go Ride a Bike , M— and I headed to the Blackwell Forest Preserve in DuPage County this weekend, desperate to get out of town after a failed attempt to camp at Illinois Beach State Park last weekend (they were full). Having learned our lesson, we set off on Saturday morning with a reservation in hand. The Metra BNSF line took us from Union Station to Naperville, from which the…
Yesterday we took a too-quick overnight trip to the Sugar River Forest Preserve in Winnebago County. There are walk-in sites right on the banks of the Sugar River, and we were lucky enough to snag the last one even though we arrived late after a dinner in nearby Rockton. Although the walk-in sites don’t have much privacy from one another, they are nicely isolated from the road and it’s lovely to…
I haven’t had time to keep up over the past month but I wanted to quickly post a few photos and a few brief notes. M— and I got a Zipcar and went out to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie . This was a bust; the “prairie” is composed mostly of cultivated soybean fields. But there are abandoned Army explosives bunkers you can poke around, which is a little bit fun. For Thanksgiving we went to…
Day One For M—’s birthday we rented a car and headed to Galena. It’s a tourist town and lousy with B&Bs, but we (I) had delayed too long in planning this trip and they were all full, so we ended up at the DeSoto House Hotel , a very cool old downtown hotel of the kind you don’t see much of anymore except in big cities at risible rates. The plan was: Friday night and Saturday in Galena, then…
Day One This unseasonably warm November left me with no choice but to try to fit in one last (?) quick weekend bike overnight. The plan: Amtrak to Mendota, IL, a short ride over country roads to the western end of the I&M Canal State Trail , then along the trail, camping overnight and finishing up at its eastern end in Joliet, where I could catch Metra commuter rail back to Chicago—hopefully in…
Sunday afternoon M— and I went down to Pullman on the far south side. (Our interest was only partly historical; we also wanted to visit Old Fashioned Donuts in Roseland, but it turned out to be closed on Sundays, and so did Dat Donut in Chatham where we’d hoped to stop on the way home. What the hell, donut shops of Chicago? Surely, of all the days, Sunday is the best-suited for donuts. At any…
In preparation for my bike camping trip a few weeks back, I went and printed out nice color copies of the Illinois DOT county bike maps for Cook and Lake Counties, thinking that they’d do a better job of showing the bike paths I’d be using than Google Maps. I’d heard these maps spoken highly of by local cyclists. My experience, however, was that these maps so poorly described the actual ground…
At some godawful hour of the morning on Saturday M— left for a trip to New York with a friend, and rather than rattle around at home all weekend reading MetaFilter I decided to take my first bike camping trip—an easy one, to Illinois Beach State Park outside of Zion, IL, about 40 miles from my door, and reachable almost entirely by bike trails. A while back I bought a Cetma 7-rail front rack off…