In My Backyard

In recent months, I was shocked twice to learn about somewhat major events that happened in my backyard, and of which I didn’t know anything at all.

The first story is detailed in Ben Mezrich’s book Bitcoin Billionaires. It tells the story of the Winklevos twins’ second act: the world of Bitcoin. Both are working with Charlie Shrem to learn and build early infrastructure to trade crypto. Several important events happen in San Jose. I missed the news of those early Bitcoin conferences. Also San Jose native Roger Ver has an important role in the book. And I learned about a new dining spot in San Jose’s Japan town.

The second story I learned about in Netflix’s The Web of Make Believe: Death, Lies and the Internet, The Stingray episode. In the late 90s, pre-Wifi, when I was dialing up using EarthLink, Daniel Rigmaiden was using a Verizon Airlink card to connect to the internet from his apartment in Santa Clara, opposite of Santa Clara university. The story describes the capture of Daniel, who criminally made thousands of dollars scamming the IRS. In order to find Daniel, the government used Stringray, a new and dubious technology which legality is discussed in the documentary. Watching the 2-part story, Stingray was a huge deal. The entire story, which happened less than 10 miles from me, escaped me.

July 10, 2022

Europe Is Souring

After three Covid years, we made it back to the old comtinent and Belgium.

A lot has remained unchanged. The Sunday morning little breads, pistollets, homemade or from the bakery, taste as decliciously as 25 years ago. Twice-fried Belgian fries define what fries are all about, especially when paired with a strong beer and a large pot of mussels with onion and celery. The speed limits in Belgium remain as confusing as ever, as are so many traffic rules. I surely misread some Speeding limited and expect one or two speeding tickets from the many speeding cameras in Flanders.

Plenty has changed for the good as well. Many old building have been restored to their original glory. The country felt as it if it put on a new coat, and underwent an overall clean up, with plenty of flowers everywhere and flags. Some of the places we visited, Gent, Zoutleeuw, De Haan, Beringen, all shine.

And yet, when you talk to people, read the news or scroll through Flemish Twitter, you hear a different story. The distrust of government institutions is at its highest. Ordinary farmer are in the street. Nobody believes the government when it comes to energy policy, Covid, or Russia.

I was used this type of conspiracy rethoric and distrust from “freedom-loving-American-patriots”. It is no longer limited to the woods of Idaho, Texas, or New Hampshire. It is in Flanders, in the fields of Holland, in England. The general sentiment in Europe is sour. People aren’t content, and anticipating some sort of major (political) change. People had enough. Something is brewing.

July 7, 2022

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