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.

don't tread on...

my shadow, don't tread on my shadow, man! or do... whatever.

beer on a "school night"?

well the can says "don't age," so i'm just doin' what it says

stuffed squash... fall has arrived

stuffed acorn squash with brown rice (spiced with cinnamon and clove), cranberries, rasins, honey, and cashews. mmm...

i'm rooting for my habenero plant, but...

these are number 4, 5, and 6 of the season and i have at least 20 more dark green ones on the plant.

stuff i find

i love the random crap i come across on my cyclecommutes.

got it on the first try this morning

heh... we moved from 10th floor to 12th floor last week. this is the first morning on which i pushed the right button on the elevator.

moving labels

that heath guy really gets around... product marketing, cloud technology, boxes (literally, moving boxes)

wildlife on my cyclecommute

totally would have missed the bald eagle sitting on the swimming raft in lake mccarrons this morning if i'd been driving a car. totally would have had a better camera than the one on my phone, though. time to start packing the compact 10x zoom camera on my commutes.

today's home office

with a coworker, too!

new booooooots!

ugliest soccer boots ever == most awesome soccer boots ever

shadows to and from work

ruins by the river

Did some shooting near the mill ruins by the river, today. Here are a few samples, some are heavily edited.

broken window

visitor during dinner at sea salt eatery

shadows growing

today's commuter bike in motion and at rest

faint shadow on a misty morning

well, since i had the surly out, anyway

i figured i'd put its bottle opener to use!

look who i met on my way home

a spotted salamander was pulling a rango! it appears that, yes, he got to the other side.

the nicest thing about working from home

real live serviceable windows. a window seat at the office today would be hell.

sapcicle

we trimmed our pine tree today. it wept.

--rt

the pier at grand marais michigan

the pier at grand marais michigan is built to withstand the destructive forces of the great gitcheegumee (lake superior). we all know about its fury and power, if not first hand, at least from mr. lightfoot's lyrics. it can be pretty crazy.

well, the pier--actually a sea wall protecting the entry to the harbor--has some sections built out of interlocking steel sections that are filled with rock and cement.

 we wandered out on this structure last week and i found a bunch of interesting perspectives i wanted to capture. first, i was intrigued by the metal outer shells of the structure. their lego-like interlocking fingers were very cool, so they are the "interlocks." later, i found some rocks that still had the holes in them that were used to mine them from wherever they were quarried, and that set was dubbed the "rockholes."

the interlocks

the rockholes