2022 Spring Classics Redux

A few comments on this year’s Spring Classics.

The Gladiators Are Back

• Wout Van Aert was never stronger in the Spring Classics. A couple of wins and lots of podium spots. Too bad he got sick the week before De Ronde.
• Rest did wonders for Mathieu van der Poel. He was ready and won the most important race. He will learn from this preparation and rest more often.
• Pogacar riding the cobblestone classics is a wonderful breath of fresh air. He’ll come back for revenge next year.
• Kopecky was the strongest woman on the cobblestone and gravel rides. She won’t be as nice next year in Paris-Roubaix.
• Remco as a Jack in the Box: surprise!

Teams

• Ineos was clearly the best team of the Spring Classics. A strong team that came to ride. Gone are the Froome-Sky days of hyper-calculated racing.

• Intermarché-Wanty-Gobert Matériaux was my favorite team: a small budget with lots of grinta and always present.
• Jumbo-Visma is building a strong classics team. While Ineos was omni-present this year, Quickstep-style, Jumbo-Visma often lacked one or two riders to complement Nathan Van Hooydonck, Tiesj Benoot and Christophe Laporte. Perhaps with a bit more strategic riding, they have that extra rider in the finale.
• Lotto-Soudal is almost certain to lose its WorldTeam status. Campenaerts and the Lotto youngsters need a bit more team. As Alpecin has shown, WorldTeam status is overrated. Go build in freedom on a new Lotto team.

The Races

• De Ronde was great to watch. However it is borderline too hard. The tough finale postpones the fireworks to very late in the race. De Ronde has become a long battle where the strongest riders battle it out on the final climb of the Oude Kwaremont or Paterberg. We won’t be seeing many early attacks on the Taaienberg by the favorites, nor will we see the exciting race changes as in one the best Rondes in recent years: 2011 when Nick Nuyens won.
• While De Ronde flirts with being too difficult, the Flèche Wallone and Liège-Bastogne-Liège crossed that line long ago. The race is no longer exciting. You might as well put everybody on rolls for 200 km and ask them to ride up the steep climbs of the Mur or Roche aux Faucons. And yet, Remco did make it a bit exciting in La Doyenne this year. A rare event.
  
• Paris-Roubaix surprised me, thanks to team Ineos. A strong rider always wins. However, because of the risk of equipment failure, it may not be the strongest or most deserving rider. This year was different. Paris-Roubaix was wonderful.

Unfortunately too many teams suffered from covid-19 illness, and sometimes didn’t even have enough riders to start in a race.

It was an exciting spring classics season, and well worth waking up at 4 to 5am California time.

April 24, 2022

My Hazy Ipa List

My favorite IPA is fruity, not floral, a bit bitter, yet not too hoppy. Here’s a list of recent tastings bucketed in three categories.

Fantastic

• Hapa’s Thor’s Helmet
• Barebottle Cashmanian Devil
• Alvarado Street Cold Pressed
• Deschutes Fresh Haze IPA
• Almanac Nature Gazer hazy IPA is light, not too hoppy and smooth to drink
• Narrative fermentations, Loco Mower
• Harland Hazy IPA
• Federation Brewing Zero Charisma
• Discretion Brewery Jugo Nuevo
• Floodcraft juiced kidding
• Stone Hazy IPA

Not Bad

• Sierra Nevada Hazy Little Thing IPA, easy to drink and very available.
• Calicraft Brewing Break Beat, Hazy Double IPA
• Aslan brewing cosmic dreams
• Fall River Brewing Co, Numb Numb Juice
• Revision Disco Ninja
• Belching Beaver Deftones Ceremony is more IPA than Hazy IPA.

Not Recommended

• Elysian Contact Haze is overall watery, with a low fruity flavor.

April 24, 2022

We Crashed

The rise and fall of We Work had escaped me. I didn’t know much about the company beyond a fact I learned on the Pivot podcast that their CEO had negotiated one of the biggest severance packages ever: $1.7 Billion. He walked away with lots of money, all while losing tens of billions of investors’ money, and leaving many of his employees with little to show for in their bank accounts.

I also heard about the picture without shoes. However, that was not as shocking to me. My neighbor at Sun Microsystems used to come to work barefeet almost daily.

As much as Adam Neumann wanted to portrait his company as a Silicon Valley technology company, it wasn’t. The story about We Work is very much a New York real estate story that spread across other big cities in the world.

For the little I heard about We Work, I had put it into the same category as Plug ’n Play in Silicon Valley, an incubator providing office space. We Work provided the space, the furniture, the beer and the fun events. All that minus the startup incubator part. So, it was more a co-working space.

Apple’s We Crashed mini-series provides a much different picture: wild, fun, crazy ambitious, changing the world, growth at any cost. “A first physical social network” - huh?

Here’s to the crazy ones … could have included Adam Neumann, Rebekah Neumann, and their We-cult.

The series is excellent and continues a strong string of Apple shows: Ted Lasso, The Morning Show, 1971, Physical, Mr Corman, and now We Crashed.

“Adam is the best salesman ever” … “with a great reality distortion field.” The fact that Apple made the series seems fitting.

April 22, 2022

Strade

The Strade Bianche is a beautiful cycling race, with its white gravel roads cutting through the rolling Tuscan hills. After a long battle, the riders enter Piazza del Campo in Siena as true gladiators. All this makes the debate over whether is a true cycling “monument”, akin to Paris-Roubaix or the Tour of Flanders, useless. This is an epic and wonderful race.

Yet, until we have a true gravel championship with more similar races, Strade Blanche will remain an odd race out. Some professional riders will want to ride it to have the experience once. However, I suspect, more and more top racers will skip it because the risk is too great. It is dangerous especially this early in the classic season. Take for example Tiesj Benoot, who crashed with so many others today. He is hurt and will skip Tirreno Adriatic because of it. That race would have been a great lead up to the classics in Belgium, Holland and France.

I suggest two solutions. First of all, let’s move Strade Bianche to the end of season, closer to Paris Roubaix. It will allow the specialists to focus their bike handling skills on those races. A crash on the dangerous roads won’t ruin your spring season. Secondly, let’s do more of these races with true gravel bikes. This will also avoid the problem where more and more race and tour organizers are tempted to add a gravel section.

March 5, 2022

My Notes System

I’ve experimented quite a bit with different notetaking and journaling applications (iAWriter, Bear, Evernote, Notion, etc). For a short while, I even went back to paper-based notebooks. They all have their pros and cons, as many Medium articles and YouTube videos cover in great detail. Foremost, the note system must work for you.

Markdown Format

I use a variety of applications (1Writer, iAWriter, Obsidian, DayOne, etc) to take notes. Common across these applications is their support for the simple Markdown text format. Markdown is easy to write and read, and keeps your fingers on the keyboard. There is no need for a formatting toolbar or menu.

Even more, with exception of DayOne, I have access to the native note Markdown file. I do not need any subscription-based application to have access to my notes. Since they are text files, they are also small and can be easily moved, rearranged, or backed up.

Connected Notes Through Obsidian

My recently discovery of Obsidian opened my eyes to the possibilities of connected notes. I started using Obsidian to capture ideas in smaller notes, and link various ideas together. It is place to capture raw notes, a repository of things I don’t want to forget. Obsidian is a rich platform with many extensions. For example, through a plugin, I automatically import article highlights from Matter. While writing in one pane, I have access to my reference notes in another pane.

External Synchronization and Revision Control

File synchronization and versioning should be a system service, and not a pay feature of an application. Applications should support all the common mechanisms: iCloud Drive, Google Drive and Dropbox. At the moment, Obsidian mobile only support iCloud Drive. This appears to be an iOS/mobile limitation, as Obsidian supports storing your vaults in DropBox on MacOS.

From what I can tell, iCloud Drive does not support versioning, like iCloud or Google Drive provides. That is a major iCloud Drive shortcoming. For now, where possible I will keep using Dropbox and Google Drive

Encryption and File Protection

None of the tools I mentioned above support encryption natively. An Obsidian plugin called Meld Encrypt lets you selectively encrypt files, although I haven’t tried it yet. Thus, I don’t use these tools for sensitive information. My personal thoughts and journal are stored in DayOne. DayOne provides encryption, synchronization through iCloud and also support Markdown.

February 21, 2022

Finding Ultra

I recently finished reading Rich Roll’s Finding Ultra. The book describes the life of Rich Roll, from a top high school and college swimmer, to his struggles with alcohol, a professional life as an entertainment lawyer, and finally to the making of a vegan-powered ultra-athlete.

Rich Roll is now a famous podcaster. The Rich Roll podcast is consistently a favorite in the self-improvement, personal development, and healthy living category.

Finding Ultra reminded me a lot about Christopher McDougal’s Born to Run. After reading Born to Run, my running became more deliberate. I started running longer distances, and my pace improved little by little. The book motivated me to become a better runner. You could even find some iskiate in my fridge from time to time.

I have now replaced the iskiate with a more plant-based and wholesome diet, inspired by Rich Roll. I have no ultra ambitions. However, I am spending several hours in the weekend riding the hilly roads of the Bay Area. I am now averaging more than 50 miles per week, with regularly rides over 40 miles.

After reading the book, I’ve adopted several lifestyle and workout changes:

• Eat a more plant-based and wholesome food diet
• A big glass of cold water in the morning. I am also mixing in the rather expensive Athletic Greens (AG1) supplements. This is still an experiment.
• Reduce dairy (Hello, Oatmilk) and caffeine
• Reduce alcohol
• Pay closer attention to the heart rate zones while working out. Riding slowly and keeping my heart rate in the aerobic zones is hard. Based upon the NTNU max heart rate calculator my HRmax is 182. That puts my Z2 at 109-126 and Z3 at 127-144bpm. Staying below 144 for endurance rides is not easy. On a recent 45 miler with quite a few climbs, my average heart rate was 152 bpm.
• During a long ride, I eat nuts, a protein bar, or even a small wholesome meal with beans and rice, rather than sugary gels.
• Post-workout, I use a foam roller.
• Work out the whole body through core, Pilates, and yoga.

My goal is to build up the muscle and endurance to ride an imperial century (100 miles or 160.9 km). Twenty years ago, that was not a problem at all. Now, the longest ride in the past 6 months has been a metric century (61 miles or 100 km). That was tough. With the recent AIDS/LifeCycle training rides, I feel more than prepared to repeat it.

I am finding my own ultra.

February 21, 2022

Fayetteville, Hopefully the Beginning of a New Cycling Style

The 2022 UCI Cyclo-Cross World Championships in Fayetteville, Arkansas are brought to us by Walmart. And like Walmart, they do not include the top quality racers Wout Van Aert and Mathieu van der Poel. Nevertheless, many great racers did make it across the pond to the US.

Watching the pre-race coverage on Belgian television, the overall sentiment is that this is a blah-world championship. The parcours is too fast and too wide. It is not technical enough. And the 4-person relay is just a gimmick.

I can appreciate a nice cyclo-cross race, but have never been fanatic about them. The race is too much single track and too much mano-a-mano from the beginning. Don’t get me wrong: mano-a-mano is pure and great in any sport. Yet, I miss the team tactics and group dynamics with unlikely alliances and peloton rivalries. I miss the cat and mouse pursuit.

I am in favor of wider parcours with more opportunity to pass. Harder surface with more gravel will broaden the sport. Gravel bikes are super popular these day, especially in the US. If cyclo-cross can merge with gravel biking, both will win in worldwide appeal. And with worldwide appeal comes more television coverage, more countries participating, and more sponsors.

So yes, Fayetteville may not be your traditional cyclo-cross. However, it may be the beginning of something new. Imagine Overijse meets Belgian Waffle Ride.

January 29, 2022

My Week in Crypto

I started investing in Crypto last year. My investment is peanuts, funny money to many. Yet, we won’t be hurting if this investment goes sideways. Here are a few of my learnings from last week in the world of crypto.

After this week’s bloodbad in Crypto, my investment is down 35%. Ouch! I was getting used to a lot of volatility with swings of +/- 20%. This week was different: this felt like a correction, a reset. Often a down week means a buying opportunity. I decided however not to investment more money in crypto. The true applications are yet to be invented.

I finished reading Ben Mezrich’s book, Bitcoin Billionaires. True to his style, this was a great book. I learned about some of earlier Bitcoin stories, about Charlie Shrem, Roger Ver, and the Winkelvi twins - the first Bitcoin Billionaires.

The crazy part to me how the Winkelvoss brothers distributed their private key in pieces, across deposit box across many banks through the country. Until we make that a bit easier, crypto currencies and applications will remain tricky for many people. I still have to learn about the Crypto world picks and shovels: hardware wallets.

Fred Wilson’s testimony to the Superintendent Lawsky was also interesting: the Five Phases of Bitcoin.

“First, development of the open source community … a geeky, nerdy, crypto-libertarian thing, 2009 to 2010. Second–a vice phase. Silk Road, drug trafficking. Gun running. 2010 to 2011. Third phase, speculation, trading- we are getting to the end of that now–2013, 2014. Next phase is the transac- tional phase–real merchants accepting bitcoin. And the final phase is the phase of programmable money. when money can move via a programmable infrastructure.

Over LunchClub conversations, I learned a bit more about supply chain blockchain applications from Copperwire. A great application is to demonstrate the chain of provenance. This can important to combat counterfeit parts, or organic and socially acceptable origins. For example, how do you now where you coffee beans are sourced from, or whether Uyghurs were exploited in the making of your T-shirt.

Talking to a founder of Weavechain, I got a glimpse into what Web3 can really be. He walked me through their inverstor’s pitch. There were a lot of things I didn’t understand yet. Nevertheless, I could understand one of their killer apps: a truth ledger providing a faster, more direct financial reconcillation mechanism for banks.

Web1 is Read Only Web2 is Read/Write Web3 is Read/Write/Own

A new source to learn more about crypto is CordaCon.

January 23, 2022

I Doubt There Will Be a Us Super App

My Googly wife is the lone Android holdout in the family. Most recently my daughter moved over to the Apple-verse, when she got an iPhone 13.

I have been loving Apple Music, TV+ (Hello Ted Lasso) and Fitness+ during the pandamic years. For a mere $5 per month extra, most of us are now fully Applified with Apple One: Music, News+, TV+, iCloud+, Arcade, and Fitness+.

And yet, I observe that the youngsters could care less. They live in the Snapchat-Instagram-TikTok-Spotify-verse. Their friends live the SITS-verse. SITS+Venmo is our WeChat, our super-combo. Yet, a super-combo is not a super-app.

Tech pundits have been talking about the race for a US-based super-app. I am not convinced there will ever be one.

Apple has a full house: Apple Pay, AppStore, Music, iMessage, and TV+. Yet, their poker table is restricted to those with Apple devices, and limited to the affluent adults. With the billions in an Irish bank, Apple would be smart to acquire Spotify or Snapchat to keep a connection with the youngsters.

Facebook/Meta is sputtering to build one. Yet, with Instagram and WhatsApp, they hold important aces. If Facebook’s reputation wasn’t in tatters, they had a great opportunity to buy and assemble a super app. Yet, their brand is tainted. Few companies will want to hitch their wagon onto the meta-train. Also consumers will be very wary to give Zuckerberg more than we already provided him. Payment information? No thank you!

Google isn’t that hot among the kids. They all use Google applications for school or university. Yet, in the app space, I don’t hear them talk about Google Photos. Yes, YouTube remains hot.

Snapchat, Twitter, Square, and Spotify are all superb on their own. They are all puzzle pieces, yet, none of them match a WeChat.

Perhaps a Square-Twitter-Spotify combo has potential in the near term. With Twitter stock trading this low, it is ripe to be acquired.

Yet, I don’t see a US-version of WeChat easily being assembled, at least not one that will be popular among the youngsters. We’ll keep using a number of individual applications.

Given the concerns around Facebook or the size of Apple and Amazon, the focus should therefore shift towards interoperability and portability.

Congress could mandate a level of interoperability or portability between applications: allow different messaging applications to communicate, allow different music stores to exchange playlists, etc.

In a world of many-great-apps, at least we can move more easily between different apps. This will create more competition among applications, away from having to buy into a platform or super app.

January 4, 2022

Top Three 2021 Moments in Sport

When reflecting on the best moments in sports this year, the following three stick out to me.

I am typically not a big fan of the Olympic Games. I find them overhyped, and merely providing a backdrop for drawn-out soapy backdrop stories. I did pick two Olympic moments:

1. Dutch marathoner Abdi Nageeye spurs on his friend, Belgian’s Bashir Abdi to sprint to the Olympic silver and bronze medals.
2. Italian Gianmarco Tamberi and Mutaz Essa Bashim of Qatar agree to split the gold in the Olympic high jump. “Can we have two gold?”
3. Wout van Aert wins on the Mont Ventoux.

There were plenty others to pick from:

• The Belgian men hockey team wins Olympic Gold.
• Argentina wins the Copa America.
• Messi is in tears in Barcelona.
• Max Verstappen wins the F1 championship.
• Wout Van Aert wins and keeps winning.
• Mark Cavendish’s comeback in the Tour de France.
• Mathieu Vanderpoel hands a young supporter his bidon.
• Italy booked incredible successes winning the Euros final from England (“It’s coming Rome”), and on the bicycle with Ganna (World Champion Time trial), Colbrelli (European Champion and Paris-Roubaix), Elisa Balsamo (World Champion women) to name few.

December 29, 2021