It seems that the dog days of summer are here and with heat indexes around 110º I could stand for some cooling considering one of our AC units is in need of some service. On the health front, I think I have seen the Doctor more this summer for everything from an upper respiratory infection, severe jaw pain, to back troubles. All of these ailments have kept me off the bike and out of the gym far more than I wanted. Hopefully that will change with some cooler weather and some therapy on my back.
On the photography front, June was the busy month with the Tour De Cure charity bike ride and the DebRA.org patient care conference. This conference is a regular event for me every other year for the past six years. This year was a little different as I was requested to shoot several eb patients during some of their day to day activities that are normally carried out in privacy. At some point these images should be compiled into a Debra.org brochure for eb awareness and fund raising. For those that are not familiar with eb, CNN has done a recent report on the use of bone marrow transplants to lessen the impact of the disease.
At the slightest friction, Jake's skin would shed, leaving the newborn wailing in pain. When Jake rubbed his eye, a chunk of his eyelid would come off in his fingers. He was born with recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa, a terminal genetic condition in which persistent skin problems lead to crippling deformities and, eventually, skin cancer. –Source: CNN
On the paddle board front, travels for work and my aching back are keeping me off the water. I did pick up a paddle that converts from a standup paddle to kayak paddle from boatstogo.com that is reasonably light for an aluminum shafted paddle.
On the blogging front, the WordPress theme has been updated to Suffusion and I have my own images rotating through the header. Given the small sliver of the image that gets displayed, some are pretty abstract. I am also trying out the Lazyest Gallery for a quick photo gallery. Currently I have copies of my favorites from timbrown.us (which need updating) on the photography page as a test.
The month started off with a nasty upper respiratory viral infection and a trip to D.C. for work. Then a weekend shoot of a the Tour de Cure as noted below. My most recent shooting was this past week in Cincinnati for the 2010 Dystrophic Epidermolysis Bullosa Research Association (debra.org) Patient Care Conference. Some 1,400 photos later, I am back at home trying to catch up at work and help with family matters while my Dad is the hospital with cellulitis. All of this, while I try to meet some deadlines at work and write two papers I have due for the UNC CPDM course that finishes on the 29th. But before my papers are due, Debby and I have to run our Ride for the Tammy Lynn Center charity bike ride this Saturday. No offense June, but I will be glad you are history.
Being sick over Memorial Day weekend was not exactly in the weekend planner. It's 4am and I am wide awake from prednisone induced insomnia for some sort of respiratory infection that will not clear up. Felt bad a week ago today and got progressively worse with chest congestion rivaling the worst I have ever experienced. While I wish I knew where I picked up this bug, I know part of it was probably due to riding too hard on two consecutive group rides. When I went to my physician this past week, I took my heart rate stats from my rides and RPM (spinning) classes with me. On the group rides and solo road trips the doc says I am way over on my max HR and keeping my average too high as well. So whenever I can get back on the bike, I guess I will set my Max HR alarm for something a little lower and watch the zone display and keep an average on the screen as well. My Les Mills RPM class HR averages were not too bad. This brings me to another conclusion, I think the short duration, 44 to 50 minutes, of RPM may be part of my problem on the road. Looking at my heart rate over the longer rides, I see my HR stay pretty close to RPM levels for the first 45 minutes to an hour before starting to creep up after that until the end of the ride. I have to think that some of that is from the conditioning I am getting accustomed to with RPM. While there are some RPM+ (60 minutes) and RPM 75 classes available, they are not at times I can schedule.
I am enjoying my new wheel set from Performance Bicycles. The wheels are their new Forte Apollo models with 30mm aero rims and straight pull 2x spoke design. It took a while to figure out the supplier, but someone over in the forums at RoadbikeReview.com had a good eye and noticed the Novatech rim tape in the Performance product photo. Based on the specs of the Novatech Speedy model, the Apollo's match the Speedy version 1 set. The specs are 20/24 on the spoke count with 2x lacing pattern on the front and rear. The spokes are round Sapim double butted Lasers with brass nipples. The hubs have sealed cartridge bearings and the rear has needle bearing as well. The rims are a 30mm aero shape with a sleeve at the junction. Previous to this set of wheels, I was running Neuvation M28SL's with ceramic bearings. The weight on the Apollo's is almost the same as the Neuvations at 1650g. The Neuvations were fine for the first year I had them until I broke a spoke on the rear. A week later the spoke opposite the first broken one snapped at the nipple as had the first. About two months ago, I had a pinch flat blow out that threw the rear wheel out true and it seemed like I was having to check the true before each ride so I started looking for something else and the Apollo's seemed to be nice price point ($250) for a wheel that looks like it will last many years. I put some new Forte Road Pro+ 23mm tires on the rims and the ride is noticeably smoother than the M28SL's. I am not sure if this is due to the spoke design, rim or tires. The one concern I have about these wheels are the straight pull spokes. Sheldon Brown was never a fan of these, but they seem pretty standard on a lot of the Mavic's I see on group rides. As with any new design, time will tell.
Speaking of Performance, a new store will be opening in Raleigh at Sutton Square Shopping Center (Falls of the Neuse at Spring Forest Road on June 4th according to the Performance web site. Hopefully they will be doing grand opening specials at the other local stores as well. I spun the wheel and won a case of ProLink Gold at the last grand opening event.
If anyone is riding the Triangle Tour de Cure next weekend, I will be the official volunteer photographer again for this year's ride. This year there is a ride on Sunday that stays in the Southern Pines area in addition to the ride back to Cary for the folks who ride down on Saturday. Once the weekend is done, the photos will be up on performancepixel.com.
Couple of photo shoots kept me busy all day Saturday. The first shoot was the 2nd annual 5k "Run for Our Heroes" sponsored by the Raleigh Police Officers Memorial Foundation. They doubled the number of participants this year and had some awesome weather. The photos are available at http://performancepixel.com/runforourheroes2010. The second shoot of the day was the North Carolina Epidermolysis Bullosa (EB) Support group in Rockingham. I have to say this not so much of a shoot as it was meeting for me to attend and see old friends and meet some new families who share this disease. The photos are on timbrown.us in the dEBra folder. The password is the name of the eb mascot. After the EB meeting, we stopped and had dinner with some friends in Sanford.
On Sunday we managed get in a bike ride and missed the rain clouds, but got a little bit more of a workout due to the wind. My new wheel set from Performance did well and at some point I will write a short review. Now back to the regularly scheduled grind.
Helped out Donna Webster, one of the ADA St. Paddy's day cyclists, by shooting a wine tasting she organized in memory of her sister. Met some great people, many cyclists and tri-athletes all helping out a very worthy cause – Hospice of Wake County.
Hospice Wine Tasting (Random Image)
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Made it out to shoot the TORC Curse at the Crab race tonight. At this moment, the riders have a little less than an hour to go. The photos are hosted on timbrown.us in the 2010 folder.
Thanks to all of the cyclists who came out and rode the St. Paddy's training ride for the Tour de Cure. There were over 50 folks that braved the initial clouds for a ride that ended with semi-sunny temps in the high 60's. The photos are available at performancepixel.com.
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Got up this morning to find the server running the photo archive site, timbrown.us, was powered up but unresponsive. Nothing I have tried so far lets me see POST message or status, so I am thinking the thing is pretty much dead. So right now I am getting an old machine updated and hope to have it in place sometime this weekend.
Update:
Spent most of Saturday updating an old laptop that was a couple of revisions behind on Ubuntu. Installed Apache and PHP to turn it into a web server and connected the web content drive via USB and timbrown.us is up and running. This will probably be the set up for the next few weeks while I move all of my desktop data over to a Windows 7 box I picked up a few weeks ago to replace the DJ computer at Jellybeans. Using the computer at the rink didn't work out so it became my new desktop system. Once I get all of the data off of the old desktop, it will take over hosting the timbrown.us site.
Debby and I finished shooting the Tour de Cure today, We spent yesterday following the riders from Cary to Aberdeen before a great dinner at the hotel. Today started early with a 7am start. Over 400 riders participated and the expected funds raised should top $200K. Thanks for riding if you participated. The photos are slowly uploading to PerformancePixel.com in this album (http://performancepixel.com/f481139011).
In between two 30 mile rides this past weekend, I managed to diagnose the problem with the server that used to run performancepixel.com. What I thought was a failed hard drive turned out to be a failed SATA HD controller on the motherboard. The most simple fix was to add a SATA controller card to replace the failing motherboard SATA controller. While I was at it, the photo drive was upgraded to a larger disk that should carry me through another couple of years of archiving photographs. Prior to diagnosing the problem, I went ahead and moved the performancepixel.com domain to a photo hosting gallery at Zenfolio. This will allow the ordering of prints from the charity events I shoot. Since keeping the server at running was an option after the quick fix, I moved the timbrown.us domain over as the server name that will act as a photo archive site. So what’s the difference between the performancepixel.com gallery site and the timbrown.us photo archive site? The photo archives have all of the photos I shoot and is basically a photo backup mechanism to my primary computer. The settings on the archive do not allow downloading of the original or high quality image and have a display size limit of 800 pixels on the longest edge. The performancepixel gallery will feature images from charity events as well as my portfolio and any commissioned work. The gallery will allow ordering of photographic prints of various sizes and other items. Check the gallery links to the right to visit the appropriate site for your needs.
