bike roof racks come in handy when tree hunting season rolls around

be sure to look for our results when they're posted

getting up early to run the turkey day 5k as a family. i can't wait until they post the race resultz. lookz likez we're all winnerz.

my 2011 mn cx championships experience

rode in the cx championships today. i didn't finish DFL, but i was RFC to the end. i was about 1/2 way through my last lap when i heard the announcers call the winners. i can't complain because this was my first bike race of the year. i was a little tentative on some of the grassy turns on my first two laps, but i handled the transitions really smoothly. the stairs are always a killer because they're randomly spaced and it's hard to establish a rhythm, so you just gut it out and allow your steps to syncopate and unsyncopate, randomly.

anyway, b, my youngest daughter came along and snapped a few photos of me. here's my story:

 in the staging area at the start, i'm chatting it up with, what i believe to be the only other single-speeder in the race. we ended up battling it out for a couple of laps, but i eventually pulled away from him.

 getting ready to grind up the hill... this is a mean course because right in the middle of the hill they send you on a zig zag that steals any momentum you thought you had.

 just past said zig-zag!

 the course loops around and here i get to go down the hill i'd fought my way up only just 1/3 of a lap before.

 and then there's the stairs. these classic stairs have become a mn cyclo-cross tradition.

 the stairs on another lap.

and... i'm done. this was a fun day AND i completed my race before the snow fell. the experts will be cranking through an epicly snowy state championships for the second year in a row. thanks to @smithersmpls and his promotion and setup teams for putting on this race. it's an awesome event.

playing with gimp cx photo

the photo credit goes to my youngest daughter, b, i'm the dork in the picture. i'm also the dork who edited the pictures.

shoecovers of mostawesomeness

the endura mt500 is what i recommend for @banana_patch's cold toes!

lather, rinse, repeat

last friday, i went to agile day twin cities and it was just what i needed. after a 13 year stay at my last job, i changed employers, recently. i came to the new job to help bring order to a development organization that was struggling with quality issues and degrading customer satisfaction. it's a great challenge, but i came from a much larger company and was part of a long, slow evolutionary path to agility. i'd gotten used to having people around who "just got it." now, i have people who are willing to let me try things, but there are too many near term fires to be fought to concentrate on future infrastructure.

since getting the job, i've experienced a number of up and down days. the days running up to agile day were some real down ones, and i was feeling quite isolated. i have some customer issues on my desk that are keeping me from implementing the infrastructure we need to get this shop running smoothly.

anyway, agile day was kicked off by a video address by ward cunningham download it here. in it, he makes some great suggestions that have already affected what i'm doing and how i feel about heading to the office.

• programmers are at their best when the help others succeed
• put the top list of things out there for the team to accomplish, together
• work from the known to the unknown
• when you have a good idea, you have to put it into code or else you're wasting the good idea

this last one hit me pretty hard. i had some catchup work to do over the weekend. as i sat there trying to iterate on a problem with some spaghetti code that can't be tested in isolation, i finally threw my hands up and said, "i'm not typing another 20 steps worth of data into this browser just so i can iterate!" the agile day experience had sunk in and, so i spent a little while researching web testing tools. i settled on watir and was driving tests within an hour. this enabled me to iterate much more quickly. i'm way more productive.

ok, back to ADTC, after ward's video, i attended sessions on building teams, continuous delivery, and agile engineering practices. then, during the openspace, i took part in a new-to-agile support group session called "from cowboy to agile." it was good to hear that other people are trying to grow into their agileness. 

cool stuff. 

so, building on ward's thoughts about programmers helping each other and working from the known to the unknown, i decided to introduce watir to our team. everyone smiled as i talked about it. that made me smile. really! nobody even flinched at the "opportunity" to learn ruby. cool. i do think we have the right team in place in this new shop, we just need to create enough space for us to breathe and develop software as a team.

anyway, our watir experience isn't going to be a big bang implementation. we're not going to try to write a massive, durable test suite for our entire product set, in the near term. we're all going to use it to solve our own testing needs for a while and we'll reconvene in a couple of months and see what the team has learned from using it. 

so, we're going to start with the known and work toward the unknown. once we know that, we'll circle back, so lather, rinse, repeat and we'll work our way to operating as a high-functioning team. together.

this could be trouble

a 22oz of "double bastard" from stone brewery. for 10.5% alcohol it's a scary-smooth beer.