The MS150 bike ride is coming up soon! This two-day, 150-mile ride from Coopers Lake to Conneaut, Ohio benefits the National MS Society. This is the fourth year for the U. S. Steel team, with an even larger team with real jerseys! U. S. Steel kicked off the fundraising effort with a “safety sponsorship” donation, but it would not help to reach the preferred $250 minimum per person. (This is where you come in.)
I’m ready to ride, but the MS Society isn’t quite ready to let me; I’m a bit short on the fundraising goal. Thanks to Thick Bikes, my Univega Safari Ten miraculously transformed into an even more ancient Grandis Campione Del Mondo. It’s a beautiful handmade Italian bike, worthy of a blog post of its own.
About MS and the National MS Society Multiple Sclerosis is a disease which weakens the immune system and damages the nervous system, often leading to visual problems, cognitive difficulties, and muscle weakness. The National MS Society is an organization devoted to raising awareness and funding for MS research.
OMGWTFADD was originally coded in C++/OpenGL by Dave Wilkinson, Lindsey Bieda, and Bradley D. Kuhlman, taking first place in the PittGeeks 2nd Annual Open Source Game Coding Competition. This is a javascript remix using the HTML5 canvas element.
The game begins with 30 seconds of Tetris play, then the board rotates π for 30 seconds of Breakout play. If the ball misses the paddle, all bricks drop one spot.
To play, javascript must be enabled (Javascript is not enabled), and your browser must support the canvas element (canvas is not supported).
I started this project to learn more about canvas and jQuery, and in that respect it has been a huge success. Please keep in mind that this project is not finished. There is no end-game yet, and there are some collision bugs. I don’t think the pieces rotate correctly. I’ll add scorekeeping as soon as I figure out how to draw text on canvas.
Firefox users may encounter some lag due to not using WebKit :p and some issues with holding down keypresses. Chrome and Safari are recommended.
Many months ago, I heard about the Virginia Beach Shamrock Marathon from an Appalachian Trail alumnus. It looked pretty cool. 16,000 people all dressed in green? Great. Free beer? Even better. Sign me up.
But then I looked into the logistics. It turns out there are no flights between PIT and ORF — they’re all routed through Detroit or Newark. Fortunately I like airports, so I picked the itineraries with the slightly longer layovers so I can explore a bit.
The hotel situation taught me a valuable lesson in foresight. I had counted on crashing with that AT hiker. However, as the days passed by, and my messages weren’t returned, I needed to take some action. Couchsurfing has never let me down, but will it save me again with less than 24-hours notice? It’s crunch time. I drafted a desparate message in a way that made it sound not so desparate, and sent it out to 25 people. 25 very gracious, kind, welcoming people. So welcoming, in fact, that my phone rang three times while going through the security checkpoint at PIT. Within an hour of sending out the messages, I had not only a couch to sleep on, but also a ride from the airport. Chris and Brent, you rock.
By sheer awesomeness, they were also hosting an Irishman from New Zealand, Thomas, who is traveling the east coast southbound to Florida. Unfortunately for those running marathons the next day, this means they were up til who-knows-when playing drinking games. Chris was happy enough to offer up his bed to me, which worked out because they were going to pass out on the floor downstairs anyway.
6:00am, off I go. Like a ninja I crept downstairs and out the door, with barely a whisper — not like anyone would have been conscious enough to hear me anyway. The shoreline was six miles away, so I made sure to give myself at least two hours for walking plus an hour for pre-race whathaveyou.
Six oh one AM.
Arm out, thumb up. Here’s a car.
Life is oh so good.
I like to use this as an excuse for my laziness: Work and school keep me so busy I can’t possibly find an hour a week to run. Yeah, it’s pretty bad. So I was understandably nervous going into the run. As were about half the other runners. A minute before the start, the announcer asked, “Who is running their first marathon today?”, and a third of the crowd raised their hands. “Who didn’t train for this?” yielded many more hands and applause. I felt a little better about my condition.
The course started in a huge crowd, with so many supporters for the first few miles, but it dwindled down quickly. After passing through Fort Story Navy Base, it followed a sectioned highway for a dozen miles to the turnaround. At mile 18, I felt not-so-good about my condition. I looked around and saw quite a few other people limping along with me. Well, the best I can do at this point is just finish, regardless of time.
I limped the last eight miles. The splits are telling:
First 7.0 – 1:08:21 – 9:45
Next 6.1 – 0:59:04 – 9:41
Next 4.9 – 0:55:36 – 11:21
Last 8.2 – 1:52:53 – 13:46
Let this be a lesson. If you’re going to run a marathon, it helps to run a bit beforehand.
I spent New Years Eve this year at Mike and Sarah’s place, playing board games and reveling in our geekdom. I had brought a few new Pokemon decks and boosters to play, but we didn’t get around to it.
The next series of events shouldn’t surprise anyone who really knows me and my friends.
Justin, Greg, Ben, and I ripped them open the next weekend, played every combination of deck-booster builds, spent an egregious amount of money on more cards, and trained like Pokemon Masters for the next three weeks. Our Victory Road led not to Indigo Plateau, but to Mansfield, Ohio.
On Friday, January 29th, 2010, you may have heard Joe Esposito’s “You’re the Best Around” blaring from a VW Jetta in the distant west. If you were near, you may have seen four twenty-somethings fistpumping and headbanging and trying to name all the Pokemon. Cleveland didn’t know what hit them.
The rest of that night is best left to the historians and janitors.
The following day, however, shall be reminisced by my grandchildren.
There was a pretty decent turnout, 25 or 30 people showed up. It made me a bit nervous. A guy in his late twenties walked in with a Pokemon messenger bag full of trainer badges from tournaments throughout the last ten years. A few scruffyneckbeards and an illiterate dude balanced it out, though. Justin and I had a decent draw, Justin with the full Typhlosion evolution line and me with the full Meganium line, along with a few Chanseys to take the beatings, which carried us both to a 4-1 score. Ben fared fairly well at 3-2, but Greg really had the short end of the stick. No Chanseys, no decent trainers, nothing.
Most of the competitors are really into this stuff. They cringe when they see a deck bent and shuffled without card protectors. They spend hours trading cards back and forth. They dropped their jaws when the Elite Four casually handed over all of their cards to the kids in the Junior league after the tourney. It absolutely made our day.
Emily and I registered for a Wilderness Risk Management Conference in Durham, NC, over October 14-16. The Pitt Outdoors Club’s semi-annual Seneca Rocks climbing trip was scheduled for the weekend immediately following the conference, so we planned to learn us some knowledge then hopefully not put it to use on the rock. Alas, it was not meant to be.
Everything was great on the ride down. We took the scenic route through the mountains, rocked out to Iron and Wine and Fleet Foxes, visited Tamarack (The Best of West Virginia), and sat on the side of I-85 for an hour and a half waiting for a tow truck. We were 15 miles from our destination when the mighty Chevy Malibu suffered an ill-fated heart attack.
Of course, we foresaw this happening, so we prudently brought bicycles with us! I still think this was the best part of the trip, cycling in perfect fall weather in a distant unfamiliar city.
Our Couchsurfing host, Larson, happened to already know Emily from a college they both attended in Connecticut. I swear she knows everyone on the east coast. We saw David Wax Museum at a local bar, a “mexo-americana” band, which “infuses Mexican son into its literary, countrified folk rock”. They recently released Carpenter Bird, which you should buy.
The WRMC is a two-day conference composed of eight sections, in each section five workshops are offered. We attended some of the more managerial workshops, which would be more beneficial to the Pitt Outdoors Club. Staff training, complexity and risk measurement, incident reviews, and volunteer coordination were big topics.
And just like that, it’s Friday night. My most awesome incredible father drove his giant truck for nine hours, slept a little in some parking lot, rented a trailer, and drove back to Pittsburgh. I have no idea how he manages those long drives.
