Tomicles' Blog

Cross Country Trip 2009

tomicles — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 04:34:15 +0000

I am writing this as I sit waiting for my delayed flight to Boston from San Francisco. My younger sister decided to move from Boston to Portland and I am helping her move her car across the country. I’ve brought some toys to keep me connected and report my position along the way. Tomorrow there will be more photos of my setup as I get it installed in her car. My tracking site is located at the following URL: http://whereami.tomicles.com/ and if everything goes as planned it will update my position every 10 seconds or so while on the trip.

crisis averted while biking today

tomicles — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 01:06:25 +0000

This afternoon in my spare time between opportunities I went for a bike ride. While I was climbing I stopped once or twice to check on a sound that my rear wheel kept making, something to do with the spokes, but I couldn’t identify it. After a little bit more riding, and climbing up Overlook Road in Los Gatos, I decided it was something I should have checked out. I turned around and headed for Summit bikes which was literally all down hill from where I stopped. There was no obvious problem with my wheel other than being out of true which means the spokes are giving uneven tension from one spoke to the next and it results in a slightly crooked wheel. While fixing the truing on the wheel one of the spokes popped, and split the rim down the center. Had I not gone in this probably would have happened while I was riding. Good news is that it was all covered by the warranty as the wheels, and the bike are only about 4-5 months old. There was also another spoke a few spokes away from the split where there evidence of more splitting. Below is a photo of my split rim. I am just happy this happened at the shop and not while I was on the road. Summit bikes gave me a loaner wheel to ride home on and will work on getting my split wheel replaced under warranty. As always, Summit continues to impress.

LG Turkey Ride 2008

tomicles — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 02:59:54 +0000

here is my unedited stream of video from my helmet cam from the 2008 Los Gatos Turkey Ride.

Are your text messages really private?

tomicles — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:15:59 +0000

I’ve posted a new blog entry over at Abrevity which talkes about some of the new issues with the recently ammended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and how they might make your text messages and other types of web communications available for e-discovery if your company gets sued, you know, the ones that you sent while you were at work. Check it out.

I Voted

tomicles — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 03:47:40 +0000

I woke up earlier than usual today to go vote before work, and to my supprise, there was only one other person there voting, about half a dozen people helping out and about 10 empty voting booths. Makes me wonder because most of the people I know voted absentee this year. Today I wore my very blue shirt and it matched my “I Voted” sticker but I didnt realize until after work that it matched almost exactly the democratic blue. Too bad thats not how I voted. I wish that California would switch to the congressional district method so that California as a whole had a smaller say in the outcome of such an important election and electoral votes would be more representative of the popular vote.

Preparing for Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2008

tomicles — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 04:51:28 +0000

The Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2008 is almost here. Last year mountain bikers came by the hundreds, many carrying complete meals to share with everyone at the top. This year I am excited to have more of my friends interested in this ride as they will be joining me to the top of the hill. To prepare we started to go on longer bike rides, the first of which was to the top of Kennedy trail. I am glad we started to get ready before the big day because we were clearly needing to rest a few times. I wanted to do it again last weekend but the rain prevented us from leaving the house. Weather permitting we should be up there again getting in better shape for a more enjoyable ride on Thanksgiving morning.

It looks like people just started to talk about the ride on the mtbr forums located here:
http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=465893

If you don’t know what the Turkey Ride is, here is a brief overview.
On Thanksgiving at ~7:00AM, Summit Bicycles in Los Gatos provides coffee and healthy refreshments and is open for business for a short time to help people prepare for their ride up Kennedy trail. Many people have kid trailers for their mountain bikes and they fill them with ready to eat turkeys and all of the other yummy stuff everyone likes to enjoy on Thanksgiving. Other people bring beer and other things to drink. People share everything that they tote up to the top and everyone is very friendly. The ride to the top is not very technical but its also not easy, especially if you have not been riding, but people seem to rest everywhere along the way and there are enough people that you never feel left behind. Last year was my first year and I didnt bring anything, this year I will figure out something to bring to share.

… also if you have not read my previous post from last year about Turkey Ride 2007, it has some videos and additional information. It is found below, sadly it has been a year since my last post.

Los Gatos Turkey Ride 2007

tomicles — Fri, 23 Nov 2007 21:56:58 +0000

This Thanksgiving I woke up at 6:45am so I could put on all my cold weather bike gear and leave the house by 7:30 on my bike. I was headed to Summit Bicycles to go meet up with a bunch of other mountain bikers for the annual Los Gatos Turkey Ride. That may not be its official name, but the idea is that everyone meets up at 8am to go ride up Kennedy Trail, which has its trail head located half way across Kennedy road in Los Gatos. The trail is a large fire road that is quite steep in some areas, but big enough to allow many bikers to ride at the same time. I was very surprised to see that there were several hundred people at Summit Bicycles so early in the morning, and they were kind enough to have the shop open for business until the ride started, and they provided free breakfast rolls and coffee.

The ride started at 8:15 or so and it took me 1:15 to climb 3000′ to the top in about 7 miles. The very last section of the ride, just before the peak where the party was had a 24% incline and was brutal. This was the first time (out of about 8 attempts) that I’ve actually ridden all the way to to the top without having something go wrong on that section of the hill. That incline is steep enough that a single rock, a chain issue, or anything out of the ordinary will completely throw you off balance and its too steep to start again. At the top, there were turkeys, beer, someone actually hauled a keg up on a bike trailer. Someone carried up an entire cooked pig to share, and there was no shortage of brownies, cookies, and other good thanksgiving food to be shared. Next year i’ll have to bring some food to share. I dont know if I’ll go as far as to carry a trailer on my bike, but we’ll see.

Here is a little video clip from my digital camera.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AqTWjTKJruY[/youtube]
This was such a fun ride that I will for sure participate next year. I hope that I can get more of my friends to come with me as it would make a huge difference once we were at the top. The whole ride from my house was about 20 miles and the whole trip was about 4 hours long, and I was home in time for thanksgiving with the family, or I would have been if we had plans this year. My mom got sick at the last minute so we had a very low key day.here is a link to the message boards where everyone who participates talks.
http://forums.mtbr.com/showthread.php?t=359615

Biking with Eger at Demonstration Forest

tomicles — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:43:47 +0000

Today I went with Eger to Demonstration Forest in Soquel, probably for the last time for a while because they are going to close and repair the road to get there. Here is a little video clip of some photos and videos that I took while on our ride. Specialized was doing a bike demo there but they had given out all the bikes already so we just took our own and went for it.

New boat blog setup!

Tomicles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:05:38 +0000

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is FAIL check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

Tom’s Boatyard

tomicles — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 01:16:44 +0000

Over the past two weekends Ive done a lot of work on my Laser. Alfonso came down last weekend and we worked 12+ per day on Friday Saturday and Sunday. Most of my time was spent cleaning up my deck and laying glass. In order to fix the mast step I had to cut a hole in the deck and lay some glass and epoxy around its base. Before I can spray new gel coat on the deck I have to patch that hole and make the deck smooth, then cover the deck with glass. The first photo below is showing the glass lip I attached to the inside of the hole, to hold the piece I cut out. Next was to actually place and level the piece of foam and glass that was cut out of the deck and lay some glass on the seam to seal it in. In the second photo below you can see where the bondo is on the bow section. In this photo I have already laid up two layers of glass over the bondo. earlier in the week I had been putting two layers of glass over the whole deck and cockpit which really strengthened the deck and there is now zero flexibility anywhere on the deck.

Once the glass on the deck was complete it was time to start spraying the hull once again. we put two coats of red gelcoat on the hull a week ago and now it was time for about 5 more. We actually ended up running out of red gel coat before the process was complete so I have to purchase another two gallons. The waterline stripe from its previous gel coat job was showing through even 7 thin layers of gel coat as you can see in the last photo. I still have a lot of work to do to get this thing ready to sail but the process is nearing completion. I still need to do some sanding in the cockpit to prepare it for gel coat and then comes the deck gel coat along with non-skid. After that its just a matter of getting the thing rigged and spraying the foils (centerboard, rudder)