Frank Vandenbroucke and the Love Bubble

The Love Bubble - Kind People Are My Kind of People

From day one of the AIDS Lifecycle, people in camp will talk about the Love Bubble. This refers to the safe, positive, kind, and all inclusive vibe that hovers around all things ALC. The Love Bubble is real. I can not think of any negative moment throughout the entire week. People were understanding, with a can do attitude, and going out of their way to help each other.

A La Vandenbroucke

I just finished reading God is Dead: The Rise and Fall of Frank Vandenbroucke, Cycling’s Great Wasted Talent. Frank was an amazing Belgian cyclist, whose legs, when he was mentally focused and stayed off the drugs, could go forever. He had an abundance of energy. He also suffered from an ailing knee from a car accident in his early youth.

I thought often about Frank on my ride to LA. On day two, my knee started the hurt a bit. Thanks to the ALC sport medicine team, this was remedied swiftly with three pieces of strategically placed Rock Tape. Amazing!

My cycling capacity grew throughout the week. I had never ridden 80+ mile days consecutively. I wondered how my body would cope. As some riders in one of the grand tours experience, I got stronger every day. My training and tapering surely had something to do with this. I felt, even on that long 109 mile day, that my legs could keep going on. I also moved from following the pack (in dutch: wieltjes zuigen), to pulling from the lead, with my node in the wind. Let it rip! I even joked as we neared Santa Monica: “Who’s up for continuing to San Diego?”.

I rode my first AIDS Lifecycle a la Vandenbroucke (in his clean and sober days that is).

June 18, 2023 ALC2023

Aids Lifecycle 2023 - Back Home

I am back home from an epic cycling adventure: AIDS/Lifecycle 2023. Wow!

At the moment, I lack the words to describe it all. The Love Bubble. Butt butter. Rocktape. Oranges, bananas, eggs and pickles. Brian’s Believe cookies. The chicken lady. The strawberry lady. The sisters. The pink ladies. The evil twins. The quad-buster. Paradise Pitt. Military bases. Bradley. Y’all. On your left. Slowing and Stopping. Safety Orange. Red Ribbon. Red Dress. The Ripple. Trudging Buddies. New Bear Republic. Fruit Punch. Funky Monkeys. Fubar. The Bobs. Positive Pedalers. Kind people. Coney. Tracey, Joe and Tyler. Glenn. John C’s brother. We’ll get back to these in coming updates.

Yet, this is not just a cycling vacation. We did this to raise funds to end AIDS, and to support the ALC mission. Together we raised over $11M! Thank you again.

Thank you also to my brothers and sisters on wheels, the South Bay Blaze team. We were ready, physically and logistically. We encouraged and supported each other all week long, and fixed a few flat tires along the way.

Hats off to an amazing ALC organization and the many volunteering roadies. Guiding over 1400 riders along busy roads safely is intense: ambulance, moto, traffic, sag vehicles, busses, the many bicycle repair stations, and rest stop shenanigans. The logistics of moving a small village of 2000 people every day from campsite to campsite while providing hot showers, great tasting meals, medical, massage, sports medicine and chiropractic services, and entertainment are incredible.

I still have to sort through many pictures and goPro video snaps.I’ll try to cover the various topics and keywords in upcoming blogposts.

June 12, 2023 ALC2023

Giro D’Italia’s Occurring

Remco Evenepoel’s strong start in the Giro d’Italia this year gave hope to many Belgian cycling fans. When a positive covid test knocked him out of the race, I kept tracking the race via the daily summary on Sporza and by listening to Geraint Thomas’ Watts Occurring podcast.

G, as Geraint is referred to, is one cool dude. Unfazed, even keeled, humble, and thankful of his team mates. I became a big fan. Even when he lost the maglia rosa, the pink leader jersey, to Primoz Roglic, he was graceful.

The moment of the Giro d’Italia came a day later. G served up the final sprint for a retiring Mark Cavendish, his friend, even though Mark was riding on another team.

May 28, 2023

It Is Getting Real

Yesterday, I joined a few hundred riders for the Northern California Day on the Ride. The ride gives you a preview of what it will be like on the AIDS Lifecycle ride itself. We rode 70 miles and climbed a few hills in Marin County. It was an awesome and a very positive experience. It is all getting real. I cleared off a table in the garage to start staging the stuff the pack.

April has been a big-miles-training-month: 465 miles in the saddle. Yet, I realize that this monthly total is still less than what we will do in one week, riding from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Wowzie!

(From: South Bay Blaze Training ride #12)

The 80 miles South Bay Blaze ride to Andersen Lake and Morgan Hill was my longest distance in decades. We still have another big ride planned in the coming weeks (93 miles).

In April I finally joined the ranks of my fellow riders by purchasing a Garmin bicycle computer. I messed up a few times by prematurely ending the ride.

April 28, 2023 ALC2023

On a Quest for My First Bicycle Computer

I firmly believe that exercise gadgets are to be earned. I gifted myself an Apple Watch only after running hundreds of miles. After many hours in the saddle, I felt I earned the right to splurge on a bicycle computer. A bicycle commuter will allow me to guide my on my routes, to coach me on my climbs, to track my performance, and most importantly, to make me a safer through the combination with the Varia radar light.

My Apple Watch only goes so far on my cycling trips. Most importantly, it lacks easy accessibility and turn-by-turn GPS. I also didn’t want to ride with my iPhone mounted on my handle bars. The iPhone may overheat and is fragile.

Bicycle computers are hardened devices. They are able to withstand a bump here and there and handle rain and heat. Refresh cycles span multiple years, unlike other consumer electronics.

The hunt for a bicycle computer started over a year ago. Garmin, Wahoo, Hammerhead all have great devices.

Rumor had it that Garmin was about to refresh their Edge bicycle series. Last year, the flagship Edge 1040 and Edge 1040 Solar were released. These were big form factor and expensive devices. I decided to wait for the 5- or 8-series refresh. A month became a quarter, became a year, and more. It had become a monthly ritual to scour the cycling forums for news on the upcoming devices.

The wait is finally over. A few weeks ago, Garmin finally released the Edge 540 and 840 devices.

After reading a great review by DC Rainmaker, it was clear the Edge 840 was the device to purchase.

My initial experience has been superb. The device is easy to use and provides me the information at the time I need it. For example, it will switch automatically to a climb assist at the bottom of the hill. I made one small change to the default screen: I added my current heart rate.

I also like the Varia integration, although I turned off the audible notification.

I am looking forward to get more out of the stamina, recovery, and training features. I guess it needs a bit more riding data. It is a bit surprising it can not analyze the historic Strava data I shared with Garmin Connect.

Current verdict: a fan.

April 26, 2023

First Impressions of Substack Notes: Decouple Subscriptions From Email

I paused Twitter last year not wanting to be part of the Elon Musk hypocrisy show. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter (and I made a small profit on my shares), I had high hopes. I wanted Twitter to succeed and be a bigger and better platform than it already was to me.

Twitter had served me well: I discovered new trends and technologies and learned from a people I came to trust. Often their opinions pointed to newsletters or articles. Somehow the vileness and trollosphere of Twitter had escaped me. Yet, the Twitter threads had to go.

Enter Substack, the subscription newsletter and long form platform, with Substack Notes.

Substack serves free and subscription newsletters. With Substack Notes, the platforms allows to you comment and share recommendations and opinions on those newsletters. Substack Notes is free, although the newsletters may not be.

This post is for Paid Subscribers.

At first glance, Substack Notes matches most of my reason to be on Twitter, without being sucked into doom-scrolling. Happy mind.

I can appreciate that the platform supports content creators through built-in subscriptions. Perhaps it is indeed easier to add comments to newsletters, than it is to add subscriptions and long form to Twitter

My main beef is with the Substack email-subscription model, more so than with Substack Notes: how can you to follow somebody without getting more email?

Generally, I am not the biggest fan of email newsletters. Who needs one more email? Instead, I favorite Read-Later applications like Matter, Pocket, or InstaPaper. (What happened to RSS anyway and why did Google kill Google Reader?)

My temporary workaround is not working. I subscribe to newsletters using my Matter App direct-to-queue email address. The intent is so newsletters show up in my Matter App and not in my inbox. Unfortunately, these type of subscriptions do not show up in my Substack app nor in my Substack Notes subscriber list.

Substack subscription options appear to be “In email and app” or “Only in email”. The “Smart notification (get notified in app or email, not both)” is a mystery to me.

Bottom line: allow subscriptions without getting an email.

April 13, 2023

This Week in the World of Artificial Intelligence

Here are a few things I learned this week about the fast moving field of artificial intelligence.

Lawyers are wakening up and entering unchartered legal waters. Ars Technica had a nice article on the imminent legal earthquake for AI.

“Stability AI has copied more than 12 million photographs from Getty Images’ collection, along with the associated captions and metadata, without permission from or compensation to Getty Images,” Getty wrote in its lawsuit. Legal experts tell me that these are uncharted legal waters.

The larger concern, Sag told me, is that these infringing outputs could “make the whole fair use defense unravel.” The core question in fair use analysis is whether a new product acts as a substitute for the product being copied or whether it “transforms” the old product into something new and distinctive. In the Google Books case, for example, the courts had no trouble finding that a book search engine was a new, transformative product that didn’t in any way compete with the books it was indexing. Google wasn’t making new books. Stable Diffusion is creating new images. And while Google could guarantee that its search engine would never display more than three lines of text from any page in a book. Stability AI can’t make a similar promise. On the contrary, we know that Stable Diffusion occasionally generates near-perfect copies of images from its training data.

ChatGPT lies. We’ve heard it or seen it in action. There is a lot of focus on the quality of the results. Using Github Copilot to solve Simple Programming Problems evaluates limitations of OpenAI’s Codex natural language model and of CoPilot in an education setting.

https://github.blog/2023-03-22-github-copilot-x-the-ai-powered-developer-experience/ shows how advances to aid developers are coming fast and furious. Key will be to understand how these work, while protecting your company’s IP. It is one thing to have this work for you on open source projects. It is another to have this run on your proprietary code. Some clarity around this will be important.

I also heard about GPT4all, a chatbot trained on a massive collection of clean assistant data including code, stories and dialogue](https://github.com/nomic-ai/gpt4all. The GPT4All Technical Report is still a bit gibberish to me currently.

Steven Wolfram getting giddy about AI validates this is something to pay attention to.

People have been wondering what Meta has been up to. Last week, they released SAM - that’s not a bot. Meta released the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which aims to revolutionize image segmentation. That seems to be more a building block for other systems.

I closed out the week reading Stanford’s AI Index report.

April 9, 2023

This Week in the World of Artificial Intelligence

Here are a few things I learned this week about the fast moving field of artificial intelligence.

The Future of Life Institute letter to pause giant AI experiments may have had a chance if it didn’t have the name Elon Musk attached to it. It is difficult to take him serious at this time.

… we call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. This pause should be public and verifiable, and include all key actors. If such a pause cannot be enacted quickly, governments should step in and institute a moratorium.

AI-powered magic erasers galore: Canva and Google Photos (even without the new Pixel 8) both offer powerful magic erasers. “We had to fire Phoebe … erase her from the company picture!” … “That’s a nice picture of you in Hawaii, did you go alone? … no, it was our honeymoon but I erase him after the divorce.” … or Shaggy now has (doctered) photographic proof: “It wasn’t me!”.

After listening to the last MFM podcast episode on Brainstorming ChatGPT Business Ideas With Billionaire Dharmesh Shah, I head over to chat.com and chatspot.ai. (Prompt.com is still being transitioned over to Dharmesh, he mentioned.)

Thanks to AI, now we all can rap like Kanye West.

Adobe not to be outdone by DAL-E pitched Adobe Firefly. I started to experiment with DAL-E for images for my presentations. Firefly seems a bit more impressive to that goal. I added myself to the Beta list.

April 2, 2023

March AIDS/Lifecycle Training Recap

This month, I logged 263 miles, climbed over 11,000 ft, and achieved 192 personal records, in rain and sunshine. I suffered up the stiff climbs of Sierra, Shannon, and Kennedy Roads. You can see a few of my travels on my Instagram Reels.

In addition, I rode a few hours on my indoor trainer, watching the Flemish cycling shows (Vive Le Velo and Wielerclub Wattage), leading up to the Ronde Van Vlaanderen this Sunday.

My fitness level has peaked in Strava at 102. The rainy days became mandatory recovery breaks and allowed me to not overtrain. My weight unfortunately hasn’t dropped as I hoped for.

Those California storms and atmospheric river also freed up time to get my bike a full tune up and a new chain. Just in time for the sun!

My fundraising stands at $4,201. There is still time to donate and help me get to the $5,000 mark. Our team, the South Bay Blaze, has raised over $79,000 already, and the AIDS/Lifecycle organization as a whole just crossed the $5,000,000 mark. Wow!

What’s next? The miles are starting to go up rapidly. The first ride of April is already 56 miles to Calero Reservoir. After that, the mileage increases 10-15% with each weekend ride.

I am also looking forward to The Day on the Ride, a fully supported 70-miles training ride, leaving from Sausalito, that simulates an actual day of AIDS/LifeCycle.

Finally, I need to start thinking about tenting and what to pack.

March 31, 2023 ALC2023

Revert Revert

Yesterday I wrote how Apple Music Classical needs a native MacOS application. Today, I feel less emphatic about this.

Who really cares if there is a MacOs native app, when you have Apple Airplay. I didn’t realize this earlier: I can stream classical music from my iPhone, using Airplay, to my MacBook and its my Bluetooth-connected speakers. Problem solved.

March 29, 2023