Life Pattern

Author: zimage

  • 2015 cycling in re(ar)view

    2015 cycling in re(ar)view

    Moving with my bicycle through 2015 I’ve produced more than 126000 kJ of mechanical energy, which translates to approximately 35 kW/h. I didn’t have my power meter with me on several occasions and few rides data got corrupted or missing for various reasons, so 126 MJ is a conservative figure. “Обиколката на Витоша” 2015 cost me 2468 kJ, so overall it’s like doing 51 rounds of it or in other words doing it every week.

    Due to many other commitments (it was crazy year for sure!) I didn’t have the opportunity to ride outside as much as I liked, so many of the rides were on the indoors trainer. Also my primary discipline is MTB, and that’s another reason for my unimpressive accumulated distance of 4853 km (compared to road cycling). Still, I climbed 44570 meters. That’s roughly the elevation gain equivalent of doing “Велорали Черни Връх” 28 times.

    Ultimately, despite all obstacles this is my fastest year ever! 🙂 Using “Обиколката на Витоша” as benchmark, because it’s both the first bike race I’ve participated back in 2007 as well the most popular mountain bike race in Bulgaria (xcm), here’s how I did through the years:

    Year Time
    2007 10:30
    2010 7:57
    2012 6:22
    2013 6:10
    2014 7:16
    2015 5:23

    To be fair I didn’t think of 5h23m as a possibility. I just hoped I can go slightly bellow 6 hours. This was also the year where I participated in the biggest number of races – I think I stood at the start line of at least 13 races.

    I’ve also learned that if you smile more you’ll enjoy things more.

    So, cycling-wise 2015 was a good year 🙂

    Looking forward to 2016 with high hopes!

    And now some pictures, each worth more than thousand words of course:

    velo-viewer-2015

    2015 Ride locations

  • Remote ssh command escaping

    I often have to run non-interactive commands on remote machines (thanks ndenev and famzah). Dealing with quoting and escaping could become quite cumbersome at times. Here’s a very simple example:

    for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '{print $2}' ;done

    The thing is, you often debug something on a single server constructing the on-liner iteratively and interactively with no intention to run in on many servers. But then at some point you realize you’d better check on other servers for this problem you’ve been debugging. And you usually find out that your already quite lengthy one-liner must be properly quoted and escaped. One easy way out is to just let CPAN String::ShellQuote do the work for you:

    perl -MString::ShellQuote -ne 'chomp; print shell_quote($_),"\n";'

    for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '{print $2}' ;done

    'for n in "$(cat some\ file.txt |cut -d: -f2)";do echo "$n" |awk '\''{print $2}'\'' ;done'

  • Изпитание на вярата

    Оня ден на Тасос ме удари с голяма сила прозрението за „изпитанията“.

    Когато животът ти сервира лимони и си падаш по попове си казваш “е, господ ми праща изпитание, но накрая всичко ще бъде наред”.

    А аз на състезанието паднах, поутрепах се, спадна гумата и носих 3 км на гръб. В хотела се опитах да закрепя гумата, но беше налапала пясък и мизерия и нямаше как. Тогава се оказа, че ми се е скъсал и маркучът на помпата… и така ме огря прозрението, че може просто да си кажеш, че т’ва е изпитание за вярата 🙂

    А когато не си падаш по попове, нямаш подобни екстри. Аз просто си казах, че това е част от играта и ми идва като тренировка срещу setbacks, защото когато ти се случи някакъв failure по време на състезание, действа доста демотивиращо и може би е добре да се тренират и такива работи — освен тренирането на aerobic engine, fatigue resistance, кога и колко да ядеш/пиеш, какво темпо да поддържаш нагоре и какво надолу, технически умения за труден терен и т.н.

    То при тия XCM състезания си е сериозна оркестрация всичко да е наред за оптимален резултат. И като спуках гума 3 км преди финала, си казах: „Хахаха, я това го знам беее“. Оправих я за 15 минути и 30 секунди и продължих 🙂

    Човешкият мозък е устроен да търси patterns и причинност, но аз просто гледам да остана в играта, дори когато рандомайзерът реши да ми подхвърли изненада.