Conditions were perfect. I was in significantly better shape and more well prepared this year. I improved my time by approximately 30 minutes. I’m looking forward to improving again next year, the goal is to be under 4 hours.

Pre-race antipication:

Last minute preparations:

Things are very busy. I have been getting in a fair amount of rides given the weather, construction at the house and things being very active at work. I think for now at least it will be most efficient if I just leave my ride data on Garmin Connect and refrain from embedding all the updates here on my blog. So if you want to see whats happeneing regarding my rides and fitness tracking you can do so at my Garmin Connect Page.

I’ve had a worn out heart rate monitor for some time so many of these show incomplete data. I just received a new one and it looks like its working well.

I recently had cause to export many hundreds of email messages to .pdf. I’ll save you the details as to why but subsequently I needed to know the cost (in time and paper usage) of printing out all of the PDF files; how many pages would it be? How could I know? I previously posted about pdftk so I assumed it would provide me the answer. A bit of Googling led me to commandlinefu and the following solution.

find . -name "*.pdf" -exec pdftk {} dump_data output \; | grep NumberOfPages | awk '{s+=$2} END {print s}'

It worked like a charm.

The answer was “515” pages. Too many I think.

I took these pictures of random door knockers on our trip to Italy this summer. If you like knockers there is a great “Knockers” group on Flickr.