Mike Little’s Journalized

I knew as soon as I sold my last bike that I would want another one. Within three weeks of saying goodbye to the Hardrock Sport, I had a new Specialized Hardrock XC. (Click the image for details.)

It’s less of a bike than the Hardrock Sport but that suits me fine. It doesn’t have front suspension negating the weight savings of the Aluminium frame or absorbing my energy when I power on. I miss those great disc brakes though, but maybe I’ll get them fitted on this one at a later date.

So I’m back riding after an 8-month break. I started off slowly. I cycled from home to train station in the morning. Then get the train to work. There’s no component at the other end, my office is next to the train station. I would then catch the train back to my local station and then cycle back home. A hair under 5 miles a day. A good start. It was no challenge at all.

I did two weeks of that and then decided I was ready to cycle all the way home in the evening. That journey home is eleven and a half miles! Much more of a challenge.

I was not surprised to find that the first couple of hills were very hard. They are short but steep. I soldiered on with some sections being quite a strain. But then, around half way home, I suddenly realized that it wasn’t hard work! I was cruising along at a comfortable 15mph, legs pumping but not working hard. Breathing was regular, not laboured. Just like 8 months ago. In all the journey took 55 minutes to do the 11½ miles.

I’m amazed at the human body. With the trip home from my previous job only 7½ miles and having had 8 months off the road I really thought I would struggle to do that distance . I guess my fitness levels must have been pretty high. The next four days were pretty much the same, though my time home got longer towards the end of the week. I think that first Friday’s journey took 65 minutes.

Since then, I’ve done another three weeks. I’m clocking up a little under 70 miles per week. The journey has become slightly easier. I have been consistently taking 55-60 minutes. Tonight was definitely under that. There is one stretch about ¾ of the way through that has been a real struggle, it is long hill. Not too steep, but quite long and with a steeper bit in the middle. A change of gearing strategy has helped there and I’m managing it better.

Over the next few weeks I want to increase my morning distance until I’m doing the whole journey by bike. That will be nearly 125 miles per week. That should keep me fit!

I’ve not managed to blog recently. Things have been pretty busy: Work is busy: juggling deadlines and moving goals. Things have been busy at home in lots of ways too, trying to get things sorted, clearing out and selling on ebay. The car is currently very poorly.
I’ve been continuing my attempts to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) and I’ve also started reading Covey’s 7 Habits. We are almost ready to announce some exciting news about Jamie, and I have a couple of new projects I’m trying to roll out.
I was also supposed to massage my blog layout into a Wordpress drop in theme this weekend. Unfortunately, I didn’t get chance to complete that (sorry Mark). I’ll try to finish that one over the next couple of evenings.
I’ve read some good books and listened to lots of good music. More when I get chance…

I finally got around to signing up to del.icio.us! I’ve been watching the progress of the service for quite a while now but not felt motivated enough to sign up and start using it.

For those of you who don’t know

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

But it is much more than that. I’ve used on line bookmark managers before, but my use of them usually tailed off. My del.icio.us bookmarks are already promising to be much more useful than those. My final push to start using the service was motivated by two things. First, the ability to store my bookmarks on line: I have been bookmarking a lot of sites recently. I’m on a new PC at my new job, and whilst I could import all my old bookmarks, I decided not to at this point. It has meant that I have found a lot of more up-to-date resources than I would have perhaps used. Because of this I have found myself emailing lists of links home to myself using Gmail.

This brings me on to the second reason I decided to use del.icio.us: Keywords. I really like Gmail’s labels (keywords) and have been adding lots of labels to my emails, and using Gmails great search capabilities to filter on them. Del.icio.us’ ability to add arbitrary keywords or tags to your bookmarks as well as comments is really great. You can add multiple tags to each bookmark (a simple pop up “add this site to del.icio.us” bookmarklet is available), and then filter your links on those tags. I will be making good use of that feature.

That brings me to the other great things that del.icio.us does. The social side of bookmarking. It’s incredibly simple yet powerful. When you add a bookmark, it appears on the del.icio.us home page along with your login name, your comments, and the tags you assigned to the link. That feature alone is great. You can simply watch the home page (it’s available as an RSS feed) and see what other people are linking to. You will quickly find lots of interesting sites just doing that. On top of that you can click on the login name of the person posting the link and see what else they are linking to. You can also click on a tag and see what else they linked to under that tag.

Now, let’s go back to the link you added yourself with your short list of tags. The display of that list also tells you how many other people have bookmarked the same link. Click on that and you get a list of those people along with their comments on the link. Now if someone else was interested in bookmarking the same site as you, what else might they have bookmarked? Click on their name and you get to see their bookmarks. It’s another great way to find related links to the same stuff your are interested in. On that display of your bookmark you also get each of your tags as a link. Click on that and you get to see all the links to which you assigned that tag or keyword. But you also get a link to “‘your-keyword‘ from all users”. Click on that and you get to see all the links other people have categorised with that same tag. This is really powerful.

John Udell has some great thoughts about using del.icio.us to categorise his own blog posts and research resources as well as incorporate del.icio.us into his category searches/data mining experiments.

Which brings me to some other great features of del.icio.us I want to mention: It implements a simple REST API, RSS and HTML feeds, and subscriptions to tags, searches, and more.

I think if I can harmonize my del.icio.us tags, my Gmail labels, and my Wordpress blog and link categories into a comprehensive taxonomy, I have the makings of an incredible data repository.

If everyone did that and if you throw in other systems like Technorati to perhaps add relevance weighting to your filter/search results, a touch of GeoURL to filter on geography if required and soon you could have a significant piece of the semantic web. At least something with huge potential. Layer a natural language query processor on top and the mind boggles at the potential.

A couple of other points. Del.icio.us was written by Joshua Schachter who also wrote GeoURL. I recently discovered REST and was quite intrigued by it only to find that, in essence, it’s what I’ve been doing with my web apps for the last few years!

I’ve now spent my first week in my new job. So far so good. I’m enjoying it.

I’ve managed to fix a couple of bugs, implement part of a quick proof of concept, and help resolve some really tricky build issues. Everyone seems pretty friendly and I’m getting on great with my immediate colleagues.

I got a nice shiny new PC (though I need more memory, which is on it’s way). They are going to get me a taller chair and desk which is great. I’ve yet to move my CD collection into the office

I’ve heard via IM/email from a couple of ex-colleagues this week which was nice.