Category: Misc

  • Riding from Birmingham to the Chief Ladiga Trail

    Riding from Birmingham to the Chief Ladiga Trail

    This is mostly just a place to document some of the options. But I would like to also state that people who don’t ride 20,000 miles on a bicycle every year don’t have a good perspective on the hierarchy of dangers in cycling. For example, riding a two-lane county road with a speed limit of…

  • Home via Uvalde, Texas and Santa Fe, Texas

    Home via Uvalde, Texas and Santa Fe, Texas

    I took the picture above early in the morning of July 3rd, 2022 while biking across Texas to get back to my home in Alabama. As you can see, some of the flowers are starting to wilt. It had rained the night before and was about to start raining again. I could not speak without…

  • The path forward

    This is a long post; here is the TL;DR So you may or may not know that I suspended my Facebook account, deleted my Twitter account, and also deleted my Strava account this week. This blog is intended to address some of the reasons why. I also deleted my Instagram account, but when I saw…

  • Fluffy Steve Memorial Ride

    Fluffy Steve memorial ride today after she died yesterday. It snowed big white flakes which I'm sure was Fluffy Steve shedding already from bunny heaven. A photo posted by Brian Toone (@kartoone76) on Jan 22, 2016 at 3:28pm PST Two years ago, there was an email about a bunny that needed a home. I replied…

  • Garmin Edge 520

    “Turtles all the way down” – Garmin Edge 520, Edge 800, Edge 1000. I only gave it one ride, but the new Garmin Edge 520 is running the latest Garmin firmware design, which includes an absolutely ridiculous elevation filter. That’s disappointing, because this small GPS unit has such great potential. I wanted it to be…

  • Garmin 1000 and Windows Phone Tracking

    I started this post a while ago earlier this summer, and it looks like I finished it but never hit post. Oh well! I’m posting it now rather than deleting the draft. After several extra months of riding, my assessment of the Garmin 1000 hasn’t changed, except that I am even more impressed with its…

  • fi’zi:k ambassador

    Very, very happy to announce that I’ve been selected to be a fi’zi:k ambassador. As a cycling adventure racing addict as well as a geeky computer scientist, how cool is it that I get to promote products specific for racers and competitive enthusiasts made by a company with all kinds of funky punctuation in their…

  • Snapping turtle in bluff park

    Today on my ride into work, I almost hit a large snapping turtle at the bottom of the Mountain Oaks descent up in Bluff Park. It was in the curve right before the covered bridge, and it wasn’t moving so I knew it had no hope of making it across the street without getting hit.…

  • Chalkville Tornado Damage

    Red cross shelter information here: http://newsroom.redcross.org/2012/01/23/press-release-red-cross-assessing-damage-from-severe-weather-overnight/ Donate through the red cross “donate now” Or I saw a drop-off location for donations in the K-Mart located just off I-59, exit 141, turn left, K-mart parking lot on the right as you are climbing the hill on Chalkville Rd Tornado sirens went off at 3:30AM this morning…

  • Biking to school

    Biking through the snow on our way to kindergarten This picture from January 2010 is one of my favorite pictures of my kids. They were 3 and 5 years old and BOTH of them would learn to ride without training wheels by spring break of that same year a couple months later … Anyway, we…