Backyard Adventure

I did not have any plans for a ride this evening, but there was a forgotten item at our lunch table in town today, so I "offered" to go to town to get it. Immediately I noticed I need to take it easy, as my legs were still stiff from the Sunday ride. When I was in the flatter part before Glinado, I felt a squishiness from my rear tire. I stopped to have a look and indeed... another puncture (I think number 4 now within 10 days). Walked a few steps to a spot with concrete on the side of the road and fixed it. Again the puncture was in the same spot, on the inside of the wheel.

In town I went straight to Giannis and we decided to pull out both wheels and replace the rim tape (a line of tape that protects the tube from the spoke ends inside the wheel.

This took us some time, because we had 2 tubes explode in our faces. Our ears were ringing. I'm not sure those tubes he had ordered are ok, they appear to be too long.

In the end I picked up the missing item and headed back home. Leaving the shop, I forgot my water bottle there. Not so important, it was night and not so hot. At the long stretch just before reaching home, I hit the switch to shift gears on the rear, heard a "twang" and the gear lever went into "empty space". The gear cable had snapped again. (This has happened to me in winter in Athens, so I have a suspicion the replacement wasn't mounted quite right. The mechanic there didn't appear to be very sure of what he was doing himself.)

I took the last kilometer or so in the low gear, standing quite a bit. I was laughing all the way though. Other people pay lots of money to go to far away countries to have adventures, I have them right here in our backyard!

Danakos Climbing Gym

After my trip to Austria I stayed off the bike for some more, to a total of 3 weeks, since my bike was on Naxos and I was in Athens. So when I hopped on the bike again back on Naxos I felt totally out of shape. In my experience, after an intense training period, taking one week off the bike is great, after two weeks I feel totally relaxed, but three weeks was too much. Something else that might have played part was that it has become summer for real now, and the heat doesn't make things easier.

So I had to devise a plan to get back in shape. The first part was easy to decide on: I had to build back the "base", which means to just put in the hours in the saddle, without trying to go too hard. This took a lot of patience, as I felt like things didn't improve at all, nothing moved. Patience was the keyword though, it just took time, to go out again and again.

I'm still not at the level that I was before, so I'm slowly starting into the next phase, to actually start to train again. Last year, what brought me the most progress were "hill climbing repeats", or as I named them "climbing gym" rides. Going up a tough climbing section three times in a row. I did that in Athens on the Kremastos Lagos climb.

Here on Naxos I found another candidate, the Danakos Climbing Gym. There is a small road that turns off from the road to Apeirantho, goes up steep for some hairpin turns (0.8km at average 7%, the one shown in the photo), then down to the village of Danakos. There I turn and head back up, for about 1.8km at an average of 8%. There are many sections of more than 10%, which is what makes this thing interesting. Another good aspect is that in the late afternoon the road is in the shade of the mountain, so less heat.

The point is that I have to go out of my comfort zone to go up here. I've done it once, going all out. Yesterday evening I went again, doing two runs, limiting myself to a Zone 4 effort. I did feel my legs afterwards, but I also felt good from the effort. My goal is to go and do three runs in a line.

Getting into the Ruby Debugger

I was trying to debug a ruby script yesterday, so I searched the docs and the web for how to do this. Part one of the problem: various older versions had different ways to do this, having to install some gem or not, etc. Ruby 2.1 has something built in, so there I was. Put this in your code:

require "debug"

Simple enough (in Python it's "import pdb; pdb.set_trace()"). But then I got stuck, because the debugger was somewhere in the debugging code, not in my code. No mention of that in the docs or in the tutorials I'd found.

The solution was to step up from the current frame, with the debugger command:

fin

which is short for fin[ish] - return to outer frame. The h command gives all the help you need - as long as you are used to command line debuggers like Python's pdb. But that fin thing had me searching and wondering for a while.

The site is coming back

On the 24th of February my server had crashed hard. At first all was gone. Then some backups turned out to be well and kicking... but another important backup turned out to be an emtpy shell of a tarball. Years of data were gone. Nothing too important, nothing too personal.

I got the server's hard disk back, but with the information that it spins up, but the controller doesn't answer. I put it in a drawer and tried to forget about it. I put off fully restoring my site for a while, because I was busy and because it just wasn't a feel-good task.

Last saturday I hooked up the disk with an adapter to my laptop. The controller answered just fine, I could "see" the partitions. I still needed a PowerPC machine to boot the OpenBSD/macppc on the disk. I remembered that there was such a box in the hackerspace in Athens. Went there, booted the disk (worked just fine). It took me a while to get the data off it, because the system wouldn't let me log in from the console. Booting into single user worked, and getting minimal networking up worked too.

I now have my stuff on the laptop, and I'll be restoring more and more stuff as I get to it. You alreayd see the pictures are back at this weblog and the imagelog works again too. Plenty busy at work, so it still might take some time. But it's all there, and that lets me take a big sigh.

Travel May, Photo Shoot, and Summer is Here

So this May I travelled to a remote corner of Austria, which involved various planes. One of them was a turboprop, which was kind of interesting. At least until you notice that it's actually just another cramped plane. I also had some very short connection times on both trips. On the way up this resulted in a bit of anxiousness on my side. On the way back, I wasn't the only one: Due to bad weather around Munich, there was a small belays in getting there, and some people were going to have to hurry for their connections. Myself I didn't have to go far for my next flight's gate, so no problem.

Then on leaving Munich, there was more delay, sitting around an hour in the plane waiting to take off. Some people were going to continue to Larnaka or Hania and they needed some special treatment to have a chance to catch those flights. On leaving the plane we were asked to let those people out first. Then they were collected to be delivered to their flights. Myself I had no such problems, the Metro in Athens wasn't waiting for me, but I just got the next one :-).

As for Austria, I was lucky with the weather, which was nice, because we had a bit of sun for the photo shooting. I hadn't worked in a photo shooting with a model in a long time, so having a bit of luck with the weather helped. In the evening set, there were no real rays of sun (diffuse clouds), but in the morning we had good sunlight. The model was a real talent too, the kind of person who lights up a smile and everybody wants to smile along. So we managed some nice pictures.

Back in Athens now, and it seems that summer has arrived for good. The annoying part of that is that my bike is still on the island, so no riding right now.

Ride report: Mountains and sunset at Orko

Despite having plans to do some recovery days, I went out for an endurance ride. First, because I was just feeling like doing a nice, slow ride to drive out the cold, then because I want to beat my high score for km/month. I dressed up warm with long sleeves, thermal base layer, and took leg warmers, rain jacket, and long gloves with me. As I went out, starting really slowly, I noticed that I'm feeling just fine and enjoying things a lot.

So in Halki I turned for the "longer choice", to go up Apeirantho. It was a bit cloudy, but nice. Rounded the mountain to get to Stavro, then up again to Moni, where I turned towards Kinidaro. There I put on all the clothes I had brought for the long downhill. I even extended the downhill going towards Eggares. There I dressed down again and turned towards Hora.

In Hora I visited Giannis (at the bikeshop), then went on towards Agia Anna. Here again I turned for the longer and much more scenic route towards Agios Prokopios, the road next to the sea below the airport. In Ag. Prok. I was faced with the choice of going up towards home again... but what the heck, I went on the new road towards M. Vigla, there is a road that connects up from the end of it, a bit steep. But even there I didn't have enough, instead I turned right on the dirt road towards Orko and Mikri Vigla, right by the sea, right at sunset time. This reminded me of some very special days with friends there, on that particular road.

By the time I had arrived at the road up from M. Vigla, it had gotten dark. With a bit of tailwind I went up from there, towards home. Big smile on my face for almost all the ride.

71km, 1166m altitude gain, 3:06 riding time, 4 hours with all the stops.

10 Jahre in Griechenland

Anfang April kam ein Jubiläum vorbei, eines das ich zwar nicht vergessen habe, aber das ich auch nicht gross feiere. Vor 10 Jahren kam ich (wieder einmal) in Griechenland an und ich lebe seither all diese Jahre hier. In der Zwischenzeit hat sich viel verändert, sowohl bei mir (denke ich) als auch in Griechenland.

Trotzdem bin ich immer noch hier und es gefällt mir auch immer noch hier. Ich bin nicht mehr ganz so gerne in Athen, momentan gefällt es mir in der Provinz besser. Hautsächlich liegt es daran, dass mir die Grosstadt auf die Nerfen geht. Zuviel Lärm, zuviel Nervosität. Naja, es geht auch anders, auf dem Land ist es auch schön.

Get me the Book... Now.

As I'm slowly getting around to setup more and more of the server's stuff again, I remembered that I had wanted to get me the book Absolute OpenBSD when it came out. Well, it came out some while ago. I hopped over to the publisher and got me the ebook.

At which point I remembered how much longer it would have taken some years ago. I either would have ordered the book online, waiting some days for delivery. Or even ordered through a bookshop, hoping that they would get me the right one. Or I'd go to a bookshop with lots of tech books, hoping that I wouldn't end up with an outdated, older version by mistake.

Now I got the ebook, and if I had wanted it, I could have still gotten the paper version along for a few dollars more. What's more, there is no "DRM" or "copy protection" on the book, so no hassle. I even get the PDF along with the epub,

Crash, there Goes the Server

So, there was a few days of outage here in betabug.ch-land. On Monday morning, the venerable, old G4 crashed hard (as in: hardware). It didn't come back up again. One disk is truncated, one disk spins up, but the controller doesn't "reply". Some data exists in backups, some data exists in backups that consist of a tarball that is damaged.

I would say life is like that, but like is way more than that. I'm also way too busy to say much. I'm working to restore services (a lot already works again, some stuff is still missing). More will come piece by piece. Some stuff seems to be lost, gone. In any case, if there was something you can't find now, I'm sorry.

200km Brevet Elefsina-Nemea-Elefsina

Last Saturday, January 25, I was out to ride a Brevet, a cycling event that would take riders on a course of 200km. The course on this day was from Elefsina (a bit out of Athens), over the Canal of Korinth, into the hills near Nemea, and back to Elefsina. It was the first time for me to do such a distance or that type of event. So far I had done 147km on my own. As I was planning and preparing for this right, I also thought about how long it had been that I had subjected myself to any similar "test", with set rules and a protocol to follow. The preparations started with a lot of unknowns...