Infinite energy like a gummy bear on a bike, a gummy bear whose bike breaks.

I write about work because I have nothing else to write about and sadly it's what I do for most of my day. I wish I could say I was taking photographs, driving fast cars, speaking Russian, slaying vampires and other things English/Irish/German playboys do when they aren't working but low to the lowest I sit in frigidly cold office staring at a monitor all day. Actually I do have something else but we'll get to that in a bit. Today a survey at work was sent out asking us about job satisfaction.... yeah you know what we like, what we dislike, what we would like changed, our comments and what not. Normally I'd ignore the survey as I tend to ignore all surveys on the principle of the "what's the point" principle but this one is right up my alley. We shall see how anonymous it was because for once in a review I pulled no punches and started hitting like Mike Tyson during a domestic violence bender. There's was a point where I got a little worried as knowing that this was my company they weren't expecting anyone to actually list so many negatives and that by writing so much it would cause the survey to explode and crash the webserver thereby causing an alarm with my IP listed in the message. That would be great. I did realize something that I left out and wasn't sure if it would be ok or not if I could drop a suggestion in the suggestion box asking if I could have another hit on the survey as I left off somethings. The suggestion box too is anonymous so I might get away with it.

I've come to realize that my relationship with my job is much like the relationship between a married man and his mistress. Here's how I see it, Sprockets is so full of false hopes, like the promises a married man makes to his mistress that he is leaving his wife. You can see how great we could be how we could go gangbusters on everyone and really make some money, but the reality hits you every time when you realize he/she/it isn't going to change and that they are just stringing you a long like a chump. I really have no idea if that actually works or not but it at least sounded good last night.

On to that other thing, over the weekend I got to experience a little bit of the cycling sub culture but without the jersey's and spandex crotch padded pants. A friend of mine while stopping by to get his farm produce asked me if I wanted to do a local bike tour in Licking County called "Land of Legends". In the amateur cycling world it seems there are these things are called "tours" you know like the "Tour de France" but without the doping and the mountains and the French, nasty cheese eating wine suckers. A "tour" as far as I can tell is just another word for a VERY long bike ride. How long? Well the one we did was called a "metric century" which gets it's name because it is 62 miles or 100km, see 100km, metric century, century = 100, C, etc, etc? Ok you get it. There was another called the "century" which is 100 miles and there were some shorter ones but my motto has always been "If it doesn't hurt it's not worth doing." The tour started at the Newark Licking County YMCA with registration starting at 7am with most riders starting anywhere from 8-8:30am. Newark (aka Nerk) is about an hour or so away from Columbus so that found me waking up on a Saturday way before I normally wake up for work and strangely I woke up nearly a half an hour before my alarm clock went off. Now if I can only master that same technique with work I'd be doing oh so much better, maybe if work was MORE painful it would get me up.

Earlier in the week I was telling intern1 about the tour and he got this snooty marathon face on and said "62 miles isn't that far, it shouldn't be that big of a deal, I've ridden [fill in the blank number of miles] miles before what's another [fill in the blank number of miles]." See the intern is a tid bit loony he's training for a marathon and has ridden some 24 miles at one time on his mountain bike and sees no problem with tacking on another 38 miles. See except here's the thing, just because I can run 6 miles doesn't mean that 18 miles should be a breeze. In reference to breezes the description of the tour on the sign-up sheet mentions a hill 13 miles into the race called "Dragoo Road Hill". It gets the honorable mention because it is the hardest hill of the day and once you finish it the rest of the day will be a "breeze". My assumption however poorly made was that the rest of the course would be relatively flat as it said the "rest of the day would be a breeze". When I think of breezes I think of cool breezes blowing across tropical blue waters, sailboats plying the water to their next destination and me sitting on the beach with a giant painkiller in hand. Breeze equates to easy in my book, easy does not == me wanting to throw myself into an oncoming pickup. Let me check my math though:

62 miles + 1 giant hill + numerous other hills for 35 miles.

No, that isn't a breeze. Had I known that the man who wrote up the description was the president of the Licking County bike club and who in his spare time enjoys long bike rides up steep mountains in Colorado then I would have realized that for him it probably would have been a breeze. Dragoo Hill was everything it was hyped to be being, .5 miles of climbing hell that reduced me to the speed of a slow walk in the granny gear tingling limbs an and overwhelming desire to vomit. Coming down however was a bit more exciting as we hit a top speed of 41.6mph which ain't too shabby for a bike. The first stretch of the course ended at 24.5 miles where we got to stop eat PBJ's, fruit, various crunchy foods and drink copious amounts of gatorade. The next bit as I found out later is about 30 miles of nearly continuous hills and valleys. Apparently in cycling there is the holy grail of hills called "rollers" where the speed that you gain going down them allows you to nearly cost all the way up the next one. There were no rollers. At about mile 33 I hear a [plung] and realize that a spoke just broke on me. The good news is that this isn't my bike it's a borrowed road bike from a friend, the bad news is that I am in the middle of nowhere and the only phone number for the people organizing the event gave me voicemail. Shi~t. Why not ride the bike you ask? Here's another little one of life's hard earned lessons, road bikes rims are apparently under so much pressure that when just one measly spoke breaks it can cause the rim to warp. My rim warped so badly that the rear tire was rubbing on part of the frame, game over man, finito, owari deshita ne.

Luckily the people I was riding with were able to go ahead and find a SAG vehicle to come pick me up. What does SAG mean? That was one of my many questions I got to ask as I rode in a couple of different SAG vehicles in my planes trains and automobiles like journey back to the YMCA in Newark. The best definition I got from the people I met between the two vehicles and the three checkpoint stops is that SAG stands for the people who "sag" behind due to either physical or mechanical failures. Other questions? Well apparently Licking County is called "Land of Legends" due to it's Indian legends, high concentrations of earthen mounds and it's natural accumulations of flint. The flint thing I think is important because it wasn't always so easy to find and the amount found in Licking County brought tribes from many different areas to trade.

My second SAG driver was a guy by the name of D who turned out to be a really interesting guy. D was born and raised in the heartland of Illinois and currently lives in Licking County because he still loves being near to the farms watching the crops grow. He graduated with a PHD in drama from Otterbein and taught their briefly before realizing he would never be able to afford to send his kids to the place where he taught. He got an MBA from OSU and did interior store design in Columbus for a few years before starting one of his own companies doing the same thing. His third company made durable tablet like PC's for delivery truck/utility type vehicles. He got the idea to do them when he did some market research and figured out that with the electrical utilities that were just becoming privatized were on the verge of spending large amounts of money to update their computer systems in order to make themselves more efficient and potentially profitable. The tablet PC's that he was making turned out to be the key and while the military and other's bought some it was the utilities that bought them by the truck load. His last company was founded around the production/distribution of computer fuel injectors for ATV's and motorcycles. The thing that got my attention was that they wanted to write a software interface that someone could run on their PC and use it to tune the fuel injector. The reason was that the injector would change the optimum settings for your engine and without a piece of software to talk directly too the injector you would be stuck using pieces of hardware to do the job which weren't as effective. So D went on the interweb looked around and found some websites that paired programming consulting firms from all over the world to what you needed and ended up with a team of Russian programmers. D. wrote up some specifications handed them off to the Russians and a little later was given a prototype that looked nothing like what he was thinking. It however gave him ideas of what could be possible and eventually they got the software to the point where it was able to provide a near video game like interface where you could at a glance take all the data generated by the fuel injector computer and determine the best settings to use. How cool is that, it's actually a mini software project that actually worked, people writing up specifications, describing functionality, someone else coming up with a prototype, discussion, revisions and a final intuitive product. Everything Sprockets doesn't do.... sigh but a programmer can dream you know he can dream.

This cycling has put the road bike bug in me now all I need is $1200 and a pair of S-E-X-Y spandex pants and I'm good to ride on the streets with rest of the cycling loonies cycling next to drivers pay more attention to their radios and cellphones then what is going on around them.