Above shows me with my new helicopter (the white one) and Tyler Ofstad with his. I finally got it all put together today. Unfortunately, I was unable to get it in the air today as there were some bugs I needed to fix. They were the type I probably would have caught if I was more experienced. But that's to be expected with this new model.

The fires I mentioned in yesterdays post have turned into major fires. The Witch Creek fire is the one of the two that most directly threatens where I live and play. By play I mean probably 75% of my bike ride routes go through already burned areas. That number will probably be higher when this is all over.

There is a non-zero chance that we will have to evacuate from where we live. I'm not too worried right now as there is very little wind in and to our location right now. Without the high winds, the fire will not advance here very fast. We have thought about what we'll take and where we'll go if conditions change. Luckily, we have renters insurance so as long as we remember to take irreplaceable items, we'll be fine financially. We have no idea where we'd live if the apartment burns down.

I am a lifetime Californian, and in my nearly 28 years, there have been two major fires that have started during my birthday parties. Having a birthday on October 25th will do that.

On my 12th birthday party, held on the Saturday before my actual birthday, the Oakland Hills Fire started that evening, October 19th, 1991. I had a slumber party and one of my friends was unable to return home in the morning. His parent left home to fetch him and was unable to return; that's how fast that fire moved once the winds increased in the morning. His house didn't burn down, but I had numerous friends who weren't as lucky. There was a very good chance that the fire might have burnt down my family's home. Fortunately for us, the wind shifted and burned other people's homes. Over 3,000 of them.

For my first year here in San Diego, I spent my actual birthday evening with a few new friends, and unknown to us the Cedar Fire had already begun. It did not get big until the 26th, and continued to burn for days. School was canceled and the sky turned deep orange with all the soot in the air. The photo above is a true-color image taken on October 28th, 2003.

Well, it's starting to look like a near-repeat. As I sit here, four days from my birthday, there are two major fires burning east of here, and it's getting smoky and orange here already. The culprit is what it always is, Santa Ana Winds. Today has been very gusty and as you can see from the normally straight tree, the wind is strong. It's actually very unpleasant when the air gets this smoky. We've tried closing all the windows but our apartment is very poorly sealed.

The fires already have names, the Potrero Fire and the Highway 78 fire. There's also a major fire burning in Malibu. It's very unlikely that the fires will make their way all the way west to La Jolla, but the Cedar fire made it onto Miramar MCAS, which is only a few miles directly east of here.

The photo below I took an hour or two ago. That's a large cloud of smoke drifting just north of me. I fear that we will have a repeat of four years ago and we'll live in a smoky, orange world for the next few days.

Found while cleaning my computer, above is a short movie I made a long time ago showing me on TV at the 2002 Tour de France. I'm near the top of the Col du Galibier, which is one of the highest passes in Europe and is used by the Tour de France nearly every year. In the above still image I'm on the left of the frame in a Cal Cycling kit with my yellow Cal hat on. You can hear me yelling "¡venga! ¡venga!" as Santiago Botero (who is Columbian) sprints by for maximum mountain points. Here are three different views showing how I looked that day.

She is very happy about her new car.

Yahoo! has rolled out a new search service with predictive search hints. As you type it tries to guess what you're searching for. It will also give you an "Explore Concepts" tab which gives you words to associate with the search you just performed. I was playing around with this and I searched my friends name, Chris Nekarda, and I discovered that Yahoo! pretty much has him nailed down.

Donuts are truly the gateway to understanding his soul. It does a slightly worse job with me. I don't own anything made by Nikon.

And it misses Melissa by a wide margin.

Above is our new kitten, a eight-week old female. We have decided to name her Voltron. She is kind of skittish but enjoys some attention. Our adult cat seems unhappy about this and has been hiding under the bed all evening. We hope they'll eventually get along and be friends. For now we're going to keep her in a box when we're not interacting with her.

Above is a photo of Tyler Ofstad, Me, Chris Nekarda and Alex Jarman in the 4000M Men's Team Time Trial. I've posted more photos from my camera on the UCSD Cycling website. Update: The website is now very different and those photos are no longer there.

Download Quicktime Movie

Above is a video I put together documenting the 2007 Collegiate Track Nationals. I put this race together over the last 10 months (along with a great deal of help from others, especially Chris Nekarda). Held at the San Diego Velodrome, over 100 collegiate cyclists from around the country competed over three days. My team, UCSD, did quite well, and at least one UCSD rider was on every podium.

Some notes: If I had planned my video a bit more before the event, I could have had done a better job (imagine that!). In particular, a few of my teammates are under-represented in the video, which was purely accidental. I would have liked to have a more even coverage of everyone.

More notes: I would have uploaded the video to YouTube, but there are too many copyrighted songs that would be blocked.

I hope you enjoy the movie. Thanks to Chris Schroeder for letting me borrow his DV video camera, and Chris Nekarda for a few still photographs in the movie.

As you can see above, my bike looks fast! I just hope that looking fast will make me fast.

I finally have my Pro-Lite wheels on my track bike. The rear wheel has an interchangeable hub for road and track setups. It came with the road hub installed, and it was supposed to have come with the track hub part in the box. It didn't. It also didn't come with the front wheel skewer, and brake pads, which it should have. I am borrowing the missing parts for the the next week so I can actually ride my wheels.

Speaking of nice bike stuff, take a look at Anna Lang's new ride below. Her sponsors are having her ride a $9,000 Look 496 Track Frame, which is just plain crazy. She's a graduate student like me, so that's a large portion of her yearly income. There's no way she would be riding it on her own means. Here's an article about this unique frame.

While watering our neighbors garden, as they are gone to yet another wedding, Melissa and I saw this bright red dragonfly. It appears to be a male King Skimmer. Every minute or two, it would take off from its branch, hop around in a few circles, and land on the very same stick again.

According to wikipedia and Weather Undeground, at 7:50 am today, the dew point in La Jolla was somewhere between "somewhat uncomfortable: and "quite uncomfortable." I would agree with that.

For over the last week San Diego has been subject to a flow of warm and humid air from the Gulf of Mexico. The temperatures haven't been all that high in absolute terms, perhaps as high as 30C (85F), but the humidity has been unpleasant. Furthermore, my apartment is uninsulated and has no air conditioning – so the windows stay open 24 hours a day. By the mid-afternoon, it's often a few degrees warmer in the apartment than outside. And our neighbors smoke on their patio about dozen times a day, which is annoying. It gets worse: One of the buildings next to us is having its roof replaced and all week the smell of fresh tar has been wafting inside the apartment day and night.

I usually don't complain about warm weather, I actually like it. But, lately, I'm looking for a little relief from the sticky humidity, the cigarette smoke and the tar.

(P.S. Of my faithful readers, my brother Adam has it the worst, of course, being in Vietnam right now. It's much more humid and oppressive there. However, Vietnam is 20 degrees farther south than here, so that's to be expected.)

Yesterday I got the replacement frame for my Broken Fuji track frame. I got an aluminum LD 735TR 61cm track frame and carbon fork for a very reasonable price, especially considering how short notice it was. I have several friends who are riding Leader frames and they are happy with them. Happily, this new bike has considerably less red than the Fuji.

If you look at the full size image (by clicking on the image above), you'll see that I've placed a piece of an old tube around the top tube using two green zip ties. This is there to protect the top tube from the handlebars, which tend to whack the top tube. Regular bikes don't need this as brake and shifter cables help dampen the handlebar swinging motion.

When I put my Pro-Lite carbon disc rear and aero front wheels (which should arrive soon!) on this black frame, it will look awesome! And that's what counts.

Almost a year ago, during my return trip from Indianapolis, my 2005 Fuji Track Pro was dented due to the TSA improperly re-packing my bike box after inspecting it. I managed to parlay this into an almost $1000 check from the TSA after documenting their liability quite thoroughly.

The bike wasn't actually fatally damaged. It still rode true and there weren't any cracks, just a dent. Aluminum tubes are strong enough to use as long as they aren't creased with sharp edges (this is what I have been told). For the last five months I've been riding my Fuji with a dent in the downtube with no problems -- until now. Now, I'm afraid, the bike has made it's last lap of a velodrome. Yesterday I found that the dent has turned into a crack that you can see. The crack starts in the dent and works around the bottom of the tube to the other side.

In my Fuji's lifetime it has seen four velodromes: San Diego, Hellyer in San Jose, Northbrook in Chicago and Major Taylor in Indianapolis. My cyclometer has 2850 km on it, which works out to 1770 mi. Most of my time has been in San Diego, which is a 333 meter track. Major Taylor is also 333m, while Hellyer and and Northbrook are slightly longer. I'll simply use a 333 meter lap. That odometer distance gives 6800 laps. I'm sure the actual number is quite different than that, but you get the idea. 6800 laps is a bunch of going fast, and turning left. And not forgetting to pedal.

Goodbye good friend!

Now I need to find a new frame, soon. Hopefully the new one won't have any red on it, my one dislike of the Fuji. When that's all sorted out I'll post a picture of my new single speed steed.

This last weekend I drove to Las Vegas for a one night stay to celebrate Chris Schroeder's upcoming wedding. Las Vegas wouldn't have been my first choice for such an occasion, but I'm not getting married.

A nice rock formation

The drive itself is actually much more interesting than, say, the drive on I-5 in the central valley. Unlike that drive, there's lots of topography to see. The Mojave is surrounded by fairly high mountains and to get to Las Vegas you have to drive over them. The weather provided a point of conversation too. The desert southwest was in a heat wave over the weekend and we saw a high of 116 in Baker, CA. I'm sure my mother was happy to not be on this trip.

I went with three other people besides Chris: Paul and Shane, both physicists, and Francisco, a Portuguese bioengineering graduate student. He's Portuguese by nationality, not his studies. We stayed over Saturday night in Las Vegas at Binion's hotel on the old strip. The old strip of Las Vegas was the strip until about the 1950s. Since then, most of the development money has gone to the new strip which is farther South, outside of the Las Vegas city limits. Because the new strip is where most people go, the old strip tries really hard to attract tourist and gambling money.

One of the things the old strip has done to attract visitors is to convert the main street into the Fremont Street Experience. The road was turned into a pedestrian mall and a 5 block long canopy was erected. The inside of the canopy is covered in millions of LEDs which plays video throughout the night. It's all very excessive. The videos celebrate what's great about the USA: NASCAR, dancing ladies, loud classic rock and country music, and cool computer graphics. They also have free street attractions, like four motorcycles in a sphere.

There's other evidence of the USA in its finest form in Las Vegas. I was aghast at the number of people with small children with them at 11:30pm.

Also the number of amazingly fat people. The convergence of so many temptations is unique too. My submission to temptation of gambling cost me $10. I did not submit to the other temptations which would have further emptied my wallet.

Overall I found Las Vegas more interesting than entertaining. I have a strong enough mathematical background and not enough greed to find gambling worthwhile. I find nudie bars boring. The various shows in Las Vegas are out of my price range (most start at around $70). I suppose if I was a heavy drinker I could find all of the above compelling (or at least a good idea while intoxicated), but, alas, I'm not. It should be a while before I visit Las Vegas again.