Overpacked For AIDS/Lifecycle 2025
After my ALC2023, I jotted down a few packing notes. They came in handy packing for this year’s ride.
The big lesson from ALC2025 is that I overpacked. My new rolling duffel bag was packed to the brim, and that excluded a large sleeping pad strapped to the top. Here are my lessons.
What Worked Out Well?
- A ticker and more comfortable sleeping pad was a good call, even it didn’t fit inside the bag. The ultra compact thin backpacking sleeping bad is great for backpacking but there is no need to suffer that much.
- The new full size micro fiber towel is better than the tiny towel I had before.
- The REI rolling duffle bag worked so much better than the large luggage.
- The new camping lantern worked out fantastically, as did the small LED mirror to put in my contacts.
- My battery packs worked great and I didn’t have to recharge and linger in the charging tent. Charging there is slow.
- I used the Licodaine patches a few nights.
Prepared for the Worst
I packed a number of items, just in case. I was lucky that I did not needed them. Keep these for the future.
- Several extra inner tubes, a bike repair kit with brakes, derailleur hangers, tools. (I did forget extra CO2 canisters).
- Cold or wet weather cycling gear.
Overpacked
- There is not need to bring both Crocks and sports shoes: leave the sport shoes home.
- Only bring a single down puffer jacket and leave the bulky warm hoodie at home. Keep the beanie.
- There is also no need for the several shirts for in the evening. I barely used them. One to sleep in and two to wear underneath your down jacket. As you use it barely a few hours every day, you can reuse it throughout the week.
- There is no need for an extra cycling kit if you are already have one for every day. In the worst case, I wash and reuse one.
- I packed too many wooden clothes pins and barely use a handful of them.
- I didn’t end up using the bulky medical tape.
To Consider for the Future
- A small foldable backpacking chair.
- A massage roller. A foldable foam roller is less critical, as there were plenty in front of the sport medicine tent.
- A small thermos to keep coffee warm overnight, so you can skip the coffee line and can jumpstart your mornings.
- An extra drawstring bag to carry things around camp.
While there is no other AIDS/Lifecyle, this list may be handy for other multi-day cycling trips in the future.
June 19, 2025
ALC2025
Hypocrisy
I am watching Rather, a documentary about Dan Rather and the importance of truth in news coverage and of clear language.
Fox News clearly and consistently fails that test.
On the other hand, and incomparable to Fox News, the New York Times isn’t all holy either. It tries to be too cute in their language, and in doing so, distort the truth.
For example, take a recent story in the NY Times
Record Debt Limit Increase Would Break Republican Precedent - A proposed $5 trillion debt limit increase could make it hard for Republicans to maintain their fiscal hawk credibility.
The “Breaking precedent” headline may barely register with many readers. Given the years of unison on not increasing the debt limit, and even shutting down the government over it, are more appropriate headline would be:
Hypocrite GOP lawmakers lose all fiscal credibility as they push for record $5 trillion debt increase.
June 19, 2025
Networking Magic
I recently attended a presentation by David Speigel on Networking Magic. I reread his notes and LinkedIn posts. Here are my action take-aways:
- Prioritize networking. Do it daily, with thick skin. Move on quickly, don’t dwell on it. It is a numbers game. Goal: 100 connections/number of years of work.
- Learn how to leverage LinkedIn better.
- (Re)Connect with past co-workers.
- Add everyone: Connect with folks you meet at work meetings, conferences, communities, and meetups.
- Connect with super-connectors (e.g., professors, recruiters, anyone who gets lots of looks, VCs).
- Search LinkedIn regularly: people you may know, more profiles for you, search using filters. Combine reach out with contactout.com.
- Build and bookmark LinkedIn’s Feed lists (how-to-connections; how-to-posts)
- Comment on posts!
- Learn how to craft reach out messages: find things in common, show research, add value, be curious. Keep it brief. Start the relationship with at best a minimal ask.
June 15, 2025
reading
That Was the Final AIDS/Lifecycle Ride
After 7 days pedaling from San Francisco, we arrived in Santa Monica, our final destination of the 2025 and final AIDS/Lifecycle: 563 miles (over 900km), 24500 ft, climbing (almost 7500m), and one pothole induced flat tire.
This has been an unforgettable experience, together with my beautiful and hard riding South Bay Blaze teammates, and with the many riders and roadies that make up this special social experiment, called the Love Bubble. The second time around has been more relaxed and more special. I will miss it!
This year, we raised over $17M for the ALC mission. In total, over the years, our little South Bay Blaze team raised $3M(!) and the AIDS/Lifecycle ride in total raised over $300M(!!!). It matters.
On day 3 of the ride, we stop for lunch in a little rural town of Bradley. Also here, ALC matters. This year, we brought together $119K for afterschool activities.
AIDS/Lifecycle brings out the best in people: compassion, empathy, speaking out on important issues, teamwork in the saddle and while repairing those flats, grit, and lots of smiles. Thank you all for a wonderful week!
June 7, 2025
ALC2025
cycling
Documentaries While in the Saddle
I’ve spent a lot of ntime on the road, training for ALC 2025 and other rides. There is nothing that comes close to riding outdoors, nose in the wind, snottering, while feeling even bump of the uneven pavement.
Yet, sometimes riding outdoors is not an option: rain, darkness, or you just don’t have the time for a long ride. That’s when I join a spin class or hop on an indoor trainer. It can be boring to pedal indoors. For this, I created a great Youtube playlist featuring:
- Return of the King, a documentary series about Ted King
- The Lachlan Morton series, with The Great Southern Country, The Hills, Transcordelleras and The Divide
- Can an amateur cyclist finish the Tour de France, about a group of Kiwis doing just that
- 1000 Miles in a Dusty Saddle, about a long ride in the North of Texas
- Rising from Ashes
- The Traka 2025
- Riding Fixed, with Matteo Jorgenson, Phil Gaimon and others. Great insight and of the cuff commentary from the pro riders.
- The meteoric rise of Tadej Pogacar
Saddle up, click in, and enjoy.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWqs4oHNHcfHTSoSAC08ljnDZ9WpGLJLR&si=LmVO2aP56HnTgFoc
May 26, 2025
cycling
Unit X
After a few articles on the same subject, I read, Unit X, how the pentagon and Silicon Valley or transforming the future of war, by Raj M. Shah and Christopher Kirchhoff.
Somewhat oddly, the protaganists in the book, chose to write their own story and toot their own horns, rather than working with biographer, like Walter Isaacson.
The premise of the book is simple and could have been a story in Wired Magazine:
- The military complex has lost its edge and speed, in part because of a bureaucratic, slow, and politicized procurement process.
- Silicon Valley, with its roots in the Cold War, cares more about emojis than about building technology in the interest of national security.
- The threat is China.
The authors tell the story of the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), which they created at Moffett airfield in Mountain View, California, against great resistance from the establishment Washington. They describe their founding and funding tribulations, as well as various successes in bringing better solutions to the war fighter. They also take you along the halls of congress fighting the political machinery.
Even though it all happened in my backyard, I had not heard about DIU. I did meet some similar folks from In-Q-Tel (IQT), the CIA’s venture fund, at an event, looking for opportunities to fund new technology.
Yet, this world isn’t entirely foreign to me, as the company I work for provides key technology to both aerospace and defense companies, including many US prime contractors, and to commercial companies. We also have an active SBIR research program.
Referring to how our software saves the government money by leveraging a commercial of the shelve (COTS) solution, our CEO is quoted saying,
Prime contractors sell hours, we sell anti-hours.
The book highlights the importance of Other Transaction Authority (OTA) contracts, as they are much faster and easier, then the regular route. This book should have been called How Washington needs to redo how it buys military systems.
Lastly, worth noting is the surprising and increasing role of Eric Schmidt, former Google CEO, in bridging tech and defense and in the “AI war” with China. He surely isn’t counting his money on an island somewhere.
In summary: interesting to read a few chapters; could have been an article. Yet, be alarmed by China and the hole our defense innovation has fallen into.
May 25, 2025
reading
Ten Day Countdown
There are ten days to go before the final ALC pushes off in San Francisco. ALC recently passed $14 Million with more to arrive this week. The training is done. The packing remains.
Saturday was my last serious training ride: a 46 miles and 5,410ft climb to Mount Hamilton (Scalata Hors Categorie in Maglia Rosa).
This past week, I have been in maintenance mode: some light zone 2 indoor cycling and plenty of yoga. This weekend, I’ll do some short training ride in the South Bay to keep the cement from hardening. Stay loose.
Remaining task list:
See ya at the Cow Palace or along the route.
May 21, 2025
ALC2025
cycling
It’s Complicated
For a while, I’ve believed that increased frequency and intensity of major storms, provided clear evidence that climate change was real.
Until I found out that: It’s complicated”.
Several Atlantic hurricane activity metrics show pronounced increases since 1980. However, evidence for any significant trends is much weaker considering trends beginning from the early 20th century, partly due to observed data limitations. - NOAA fact sheet
A recent ChatGPT deep research provides the following referenced conclusions.
Possible decline in storm counts: While a clear upward trend in the number of storms has not been observed, some evidence suggests a slight decrease in global storm frequency over the long term. A recent study using historical reanalysis data (1850–2012) estimates that the annual number of tropical cyclones worldwide may have declined by about 13% since pre-industrial times. - Carbon Brief
In contrast to the ambiguous trend in total storm count, the number of major hurricanes (Category 3–5) has shown signs of increase. The proportion of tropical cyclones that reach major hurricane intensity has likely increased over the past four decades. - wmo
There is mounting evidence that the intensity of tropical cyclones is increasing. Storms are reaching higher maximum sustained winds than in decades past. - IPCC
… regional patterns vary. The North Atlantic has experienced a marked increase in hurricane frequency and intensity, whereas the Western Pacific’s storm count is steady or down but with a growing share of intense typhoons. The North Indian Ocean is seeing more intense storms in the Arabian Sea, and the Southern Hemisphere shows flat or declining cyclone numbers. These variations often reflect regional climate shifts — for instance, differential ocean warming rates, aerosol changes, or shifts in atmospheric circulation — superimposed on the globally-increasing thermal energy available to storms.
In other words, it isn’t as clear cut as more frequent and more intense.
Researching this question is how I stumbled onto the Honest Broker newsletter of Roger Pielke Jr..
In a multi-part series he dives into various aspects of climate and weather and provides a more nuanced viewpoint.
Got a minute? There is lots to read. In Interesting Things I read this week, I read Climate Science Whiplash, in which Roger Pielke Jr argues that cherry picking is easy, but baking cherry pies is hard.
There is surely a climate study to prove your point. Any point.
think of publications in the peer-reviewed literature that project how weather and climate variables might change due to human influences on the climate system. There are millions of such studies, and if you tell me a outcome — for instance, more hurricanes, less hurricanes, fewer but stronger hurricanes, more but weaker hurricanes, wetter, dryer, faster, slower — I can assuredly find you a peer-reviewed study that projects such an outcome due to human influences.
He calls what is going on: The Guaranteed Winner Scam Meets the Hot Hand Fallacy. I suggest you read the article to get his examples.
We reason backwards,
Instead of using science to inform understandings of the thing that just happened, we use the thing that just happened to cherry pick which subset of science we decide is relevant.
while nature may seem to have a hot hand occasionally.
First, the wide range of available predictions or projections essentially spanning the range of possibilities means that some expectations will seem to have anticipated the thing that just happened and suggest more to come. Second, a defining feature of climatology is persistence, suggesting that nature does sometimes have a “hot hand” — it is not always a fallacy in the context of climate. However, knowing a true “hot hand” from a false one is not simple..
As a result, we’re not really practicing science. We’re picking narratives.
Scientific assessments are so crucial because they force us to consider an entire body of research, not just a single paper or a seemingly-relevant tiny subset. Assessment is incredibly difficult not just because of the enormity of the scientific literature, but because the “excess of objectivity” supports multiple legitimate interpretations of that literature. Scientific assessment is hard to do well.
One reason why the IPCC framework sets a high bar for detection of changes in climate variables and the attribution of detected change to causes are is that it is so very easy for us to seem patterns in randomness and ascribe causes that do not actually exist, or are not particularly significant. Frustration with the scientific rigor of the IPCC is one factor underlying the rise of far less rigorous approaches to detection and attribution.
The “excess of objectivity” does not imply that we know nothing because we know so very much. What it does tell us is that knowing what is what can be challenging and requires a lot of work. This, more than anything else, is why we should all work to maintain (and improve) the integrity of scientific assessment bodies like the IPCC. Cherries are delicious — but you can’t make reliable understandings with them — stick to pie.
May 18, 2025
reading
We’re Getting Rid of All the Toothbrushes
The WSJ The Journal podcast episode, Made in America? Shoe companies already tried that, describes the complexities in trying to bring shoemaking back to North America. It tells the story of the failure of the heavily automated Nike plant in Guadalajara, Mexico. This was all pre-tariffs on Vietnam, Indonesia, and China.
It turns out making sneaker requires a lot more skilled manual labor, than one originally thinks. The materials are squishy and stretchy, and are highly susceptible to changes in temperature and humidity. Humans are great at adjusting to those changes. Machines are not.
When Nike wanted to bring shoemaking back to North America, one mantra was
We’re getting rid of all the toothbrushes
This referred to the toothbrushes required to apply various glues.
Automating the process wasn’t as easy.
We spent 8 months to add the Nike swoosh onto the shoe. And then the model changed.
When design is lead dog, it is a challenging environment for technology to keep up with.
Let’s tariff the heck out of them, so that manufacturing comes back the US. Let’s use robots. Err. Let’s train manual labor. Sure. And now let’s keep the price low. Err. You see the flaw in this logic?
The only option is to all wear Mao-style outfits and shoes. One model. One design. No swoosh.
May 10, 2025
podcasts
A “What the Fuck” Machine
Last Friday, I finally took the plunge. Kicked off my Crocs, peeled open what looked like a giant cosmic egg, and slipped into what can only be described as a WTF machine.
This wasn’t just a fancy bathtub, the cocoon was a floating tank. Floating therapy (or sensory deprivation therapy in geek speak), involves lying in a dark, soundproof tank filled with warm water and Epsom salt, allowing the body to float effortlessly. Dead Sea style. The goal is to minimize sensory input to promote relaxation and mental clarity.
Some of the benefits (supported by both anecdotal and scientific evidence) include:
- Stress Reduction: The sensory deprivation environment calms the nervous system. Cortisol levels (a stress hormone) may drop, promoting deep relaxation.
- Pain Relief: Epsom salt (magnesium sulfate) may reduce muscle tension and inflammation.
- Enhanced Sleep Quality: Floating can improve sleep patterns and help with insomnia. Who still counts sheep anyway?
- Improved Focus and Creativity: The brain enters a theta wave state—associated with deep meditation and inspiration.
- Faster Recovery for Athletes: Reduces lactic acid buildup and muscle soreness. Encourages quicker recovery after intense training or competition.
- Anxiety and Depression Relief: Cheaper than therapy, but still not a replacement (my therapist made me add that).
- Increased Magnesium Absorption: Absorbing magnesium through the skin may support cardiovascular, muscular, and nervous system health.
My virgin voyage was mind-blowing. I turned off all lights and floated in complete darkness (rookie mistake—apparently there’s a “stars” button that projects a mini-galaxy on the ceiling). I tried listening to meditation music while wearing earplugs to avoid water in my ears, which is like ordering a diet coke with your super-sized meal—somewhat contradictory. But it worked.
The experience wasn’t entirely soundproof: I could the jets from a nearby hydro-massage chair that sounded like someone was making espresso in the next room. Luckily they left half way into my 45 minutes session.
I floated as if in space. It was a very relaxing experience, and I even slept for a bit.
10/10 will float again. Next time with stars and a rubber duck.
May 5, 2025
healthyLifestyle