Nov. 29, 2011, 4:59 p.m.
In the summer of 2009 I rode my bike 2100 miles down the Pacific coast from Blaine, WA to San Ysidro, CA. I started riding on Aug. 12th and reached the border on Nov. 22nd. This is my ride diary. The prelude to this diary can be found here.
Sunset Beach SP to Humbug Mountain SP
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Day 13 8/24
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62.42 mi.
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12.6 mph av
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4:57 hr
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772.1 tot mi.
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2453.2 odo
I woke up late today, kinda. I woke up AT 4am and couldn't really get back to sleep until after 6:30. I had to piss initially then all the noises kept me up. There were weird popping noises in the trees, strange wind music, and of course, a fog horn. The wind music and the popping noises were freaking me out. I think the noises in the trees were seeds. As for the wind music, I have no idea. I could hear it all over the park. I think it might be coming from the lighthouse but I doubt it.
By the time I got going it was 10:30. The ride initially went through hills, lots of rollers. The roads seemed to be logging roads which were paved and now serve rural homes. They had names like 7 devils and whiskey run. When I got back on the coast at Bandon the views were spectacular. I took some pictures at the state park at Face Rock. The rock looks like a woman's face rising out of the ocean.
In Langlois I stopped at a market for one of their "famous" hot dogs. Honestly it lived up to the title. It was a short dog served with homemade mustard and pickles. I also got an ice cream cone. Man did it hot the spot!
Port Orford was the next remarkable spot. Going into town I crossed the 300 mi. marker for hwy 101 so I took a picture complete with a neat hubcap that I found on the road. There was another picture opportunity as the road took a bend in the town. I rode up a side road that led up to an amazing view of the ocean. I took more pictures and kept riding on.
About 6 mi. down the road I came to my camp for the night, Humbug Mt. State Park. This is where the trio of bikers from two nights ago were headed to. Honeyman to Humbug in one day! I got to see the sunset for real today. I packed up my dinner for the evening and cooked it on top of a boulder overlooking the ocean. It was kinda cold and really windy but I'm glad I did it.
Later I met a man in the hiker biker camp that was on a truly epic tour. He started in San Diego, rode the southern tier, Appalachian route, northern tier and now he's headed south to places in northern California. He was an interesting guy. We chatted about a bunch of stuff. As always I find that I do a lot of comparison of riding style.
- Spent $11 today
- Ate 3 bananas!
July 19, 2011, 7:27 p.m.
Source Code and Documentation
While developing ridefreebikemaps.com I needed to create an elevation profile for the routes. Initially I used the example provided by Google. That worked for a while but after I got a few big updates out of the way I decided to work on the elevation profile more. I had three goals for the profile:
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Display elevation data in a graph and exact values when the mouse is over the graph.
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Show the location of the elevation data on the map when the mouse is over the graph.
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Use the elevation profile to control where the map is divided.
I have achieved all those goals but I don't know if the last one will stick around. Currently it's a hidden feature and I don't think it's useful.
I've never developed anything open source before. The only goal I have for this project is that it gets accepted into the Google chart visualization gallery. Hopefully it will be of some use to people there. I put off developing it for a while because I really didn't care about it when much sexier/larger/important features needed to be worked on.
Feb. 23, 2011, 5:11 p.m.
So I made another little bug fix to ridefreebikemaps.com/map-creator. I don't know if I want to announce it on the site cause it's minor and another under the hood thing.
I've been plagued by a mysterious error for some time now. I could start creating a map and suddenly the markers and route overlay line would get all wonky. The wrong lines would get cleared from the map when I moved/deleted a marker. I couldn't figure it out for the life of me. I made a lot of fixes but the problem just keep happening. Today I figured out that it was a server error on Google's part. Google then would send my app that info but my app didn't do anything with it. In fact I completely ignored weather Google had a route to give to me at all, oops. I made a quick fix today that should take care of the problem. Now if there is a random error the program will retry the offending directions. If the error is permanent, like trying to get directions in Antarctica, an alert will pop up and let you know that the directions couldn't be calculated and it will delete your last marker.
Of course I'm having a hard time testing the random error so... time will tell.
Fake Edit: I'm still getting an error from that problem. I don't have any more time to work on it though so I'll have to pick it up tomorrow.
May 15, 2010, 1:48 p.m.
I mounted my camera to my bike and shot a short video! The audio quality is pretty horrible, there was a lot of wind noise. I was able to remove some of it using Audacity but the real fix to remove wind noise is "don't stand in the wind." I'm going to try this again with something wrapped around the camera's mic and see if that works better.
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Posted via email from Ian's Posterous
May 15, 2010, 1:48 p.m.
I mounted my camera to my bike and shot a short video! The audio quality is pretty horrible, there was a lot of wind noise. I was able to remove some of it using Audacity but the real fix to remove wind noise is "don't stand in the wind." I'm going to try this again with something wrapped around the camera's mic and see if that works better.
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Posted via email from Ian's Posterous