Yes, mouse, not mousse, and certainly not moose. The Timor experience was definitely one worth doing, and unfortunately not likely to be repeated.

You could say there were hills, some had names beginning with mount so they had to be high. We actually came close to the highest point in the country, up to nearly 1900m elevation, though that day we climbed from about 800. It was about a 2.5hour climb at the start of the day to reach that point.

Overall we started and ended in Dili, and did an anticlockwise 5 day circuit around the eastern provinces. You could say we saw alot of the country, and when you're averaging 28km/hr you do see alot more than you could in a car, apart from spending the time picking your line and staying on someone elses wheel.

During the ride we were comparing the longer climb's to "x times Welshpool road", and the longest was probably 5x welshpool rd, so about 15km at 7% average grade.

On some of the days there were sections that kicked up to over 30% grade (uphill and downhill) - so walking uphill was the only option (push bike, get it). Fortunately they were usually short bits at that grade with an approach. Downhill it was hold on for dear life, I think I clocked over 55km/hr on one of the downhills and there'd be no way to stop at all, you don't want to lock up your wheels or you'll wash out for sure. After a particularly scary bit on day two, which would have been the closest I came to stacking it, I looked up and saw a camera man on a hill (video camera on tripod), and I yelled out, “I hope you got that because that was %#@$ing close.” That evening lots of people started referring to the event as the Tourettes de Timor, due to the screams (and unintentional language) when going down hill.

I've managed to keep some gps data from the event. Due to there being no 3g data roaming in country, and I didn't get a local sim before leaving Dili all I could do was load data onto my laptop and then upload later. The Garmin 305 only seems to hold about 400km/15hours of data before it tails out the buffer. During the event we had no access to power either, so charging the gps was a problem, with it going flat on day 2. Fortunately after that I was able to get it topped up in one of the cars. Originally I'd hoped for it to last 2 days, but the second was by far the longest day while in Timor.

The brutal and brief day by day account. For those not versed in Garmin Connect or imperial units, there's a view in metric link top right.

Day 1: (from gpx so it lacks HR) After leaving the Presidents Palace and heading out west from Dili we regrouped and for a little while had our team on the front of a long pack cruising at about 35km/hr. When some others wanted to go faster, they took the lead of the pack and it got messy very quickly. The first steep bit was a bit of shock, with it's grade kicking up so sharp and so quick we didn't quite realise it. There were 5 water stops along the 130km course, with the last as the bottom of the 17km climb up to Balibo. 4 of us regrouped at the last water stop and then we went up the hill at our own pace. I finished second out of our riders.

Day 2: (incomplete) My elapsed time for this day was 7hrs50min, 4th out of our group, a very tough day. It started with a careful descent out of Balibo which saw at least 20 riders stop with various issues (flats, buckled wheels etc), after that we cruised across the mostly flat land between the moutain ranges, and the slowly climbed ot the base of the mountain range. From there it got steep, very steep. Plenty of walking took place here. This day had an early cut off time due to the convoy following a different route due to the road quality. Once we'd past that it was basically a single car gravel/grass road following the mountain/hill ridge. Amazing views. I found a complete gps track with a time 30mins faster than me for comparison/completeness.

Day 3: Starting off with 10km of ok road, then 30km of the worst "road" I've ever seen and finishing off with a long climb on the country's best road. The rain started to come down just as I arrived in Ainaro. I was first over the line for our team.

Day 4: Fatigue was starting to set in at this stage, and mechanical and gastro issues from the previous 2 days bad roads and environment made it extra hard, but overall this was probably the best day. Massive 2.5hour climb, huge descent in tropical rain, amazing views. I was 3rd over the line for our group.

Day 5: The final downhill sprint. There was 6km of essentially single-track this day, and it was steep and narrow (thus single). Once we were on the flats again I was able to put the power down and cruised along the coast and into Dili. The finish in town was amazing with the streets lined with school kids everywhere all cheering us along. After the final "bump" I powered towards town keeping it above 32km/hr most of the way, managed to catch a group for a quick rest, cruised right past our hotel and then onto the finishing straight where I kicked it up a bit to about 36 to shake the group off my tail. I was 3rd over the line again for our group and only minutes behind the first 2, what they gained on the climb I nearly closed on the flats. The final "2km" straight was clearly more than 2000m.

Mechanically the bike held up well, I just had trouble adjusting the derailleurs due to lack of tools (no real screwdriver) and lack of skill (road bike is different/easier), so for days 4 and 5 to shift into granny's I had to stop and move the chain with my fingers. Most annoying and totally smashes your rhythm – and hill climbing is all about rhythm. My front rotor I think was slightly damaged in transit on the way over, so I had to carefully clamp the front wheel to minimise brake pad rub, I wasn't able to eliminate it. Now I've rebuilt the bike at home again, I can't stop it rubbing at all, it needs a service again and hopefully they'll be able to fix the pads or tell me the rotors stuffed. Fail.

In case you missed it, the “white chocolate mouse cake” photo is here. Timor finish!

Last but not least, Tour de Freedom 1000 next week. Donate!

Recently I realised I've been getting a bit lazy about inputting my cycling data onto MyCyclingLog. So I decided to figure out a way of inputting the fields I use, from Garmin Connect, which I upload my data to automatically from my gps. Fortunately I had a base to start from. Way back when I started using MyCyclingLog I wrote an uploader tool to put my historical data into it. At the time there was no bulk uploader option, and even now it lacks some of the fields I use to categorise my rides. So I had to dig up my old code out of source control and firstly modify it to run under linux. I'm actually quite impressed with the current version of MonoDevelop, it can even open VS.net solution files.

Quite a bit of modification later and I've created a little app that can upload data from (initially) a csv file produced from Garmin Connect to MyCyclingLog. Complete with the bike records, tags and routes based off the information from Garmin's site. So now MyCyclingLog is up to date again.

Also of note, my mountain bike arrived back from Timor today. It must have shipped ultra economy freight from Darwin, because it took 2.5 weeks after clearing customs. I must really finish off my ride write up and upload my photos for that fun excursion.

After my TV post, I lost it laughing at the American Dad, RAD parody from episode 6x02, that is the BMX bits for anyone not up on their 80's BMX stuff.

Hows that for a start to the less but more often idea. More soon, stay tuned.

So I recently spent 10 days in Timor Leste, 4 nights camping out and about.

Let me prefix this with I've never been to Indonesia at all (not even Bali) and I guess my only real exposure to the third world would be seeing aspects of it in South Africa over 10 years ago. Seeing from afar, not being part of it.

Overall people were friendly, well meaning and helpful. We didn't see any crime or even traffic accidents (despite the Indonesian style traffic flow). I was there for a 5 day bike race, across the country and back, so I got to see a lot of the countryside, villages and amazing views. During the race everywhere we went had streets lined with locals all cheering us on. My impression was there is a very strong sense of patriotism and unity for the country, despite there still being some rebel factions and it's history being covered in bloodshed. It seems the vast majority are proud to call Timor Leste their home. Before going I wasn't aware of how important Timor Leste was during WW2 especially for us Australians. While there we went the memorial at Dare (which had an amazing view of Dili from the hills), and on our way through Balibo we visited the house where the 5 journalists were killed in 1975.

Initially I guess I was hesitant as to why I was there in the first place, but once we were out on the road dodging cars and motorbikes it all came back to me. The 5 days of the race were awesome, although very tough at times and even though I've done a hard 5 day road ride before, this was something else. We climbed up to over 1900m elevation, we had to walk up rough sections with a grade of >28% and descend single track with gradients over 30%. Battling the heat and humidity on the coast and the wind and rain through the hills we raced on. I'll upload my photos to my gallery and put up some links to the gps data once I've sorted out the details. I also need to update mycyclinglog as it's a bit out of date again.

During my time there I even met President José Ramos-Horta and shook his hand. During his addresses to the riders he was humorous and very down to earth, and after watching Balibo I saw further insight into how strongly he cares for his country. From my limited and outside view he's an excellent choice for a leader. Lets not say anything about Australia's political situation, actually, no just one thing. We tried really hard to tie the election (bah at two party preferred system) and the AFL grand final did manage a tie. Movin right along.

After BikeSnobNYC linked to some minimalists and made fun of their purple tshirts, I read some of their blogs and sort of got inspired. I guess it's something I've been on the edge of for a while and all these various bloggers just say it like it is. So maybe it wasn't a delusion or bad idea, just something I hadn't thought through to a conclusion point. So as a start, I've started on a much needed spring clean and I've been far more ruthless than before with the stuff that's been here but never used in ages.

Quick storage update. I bought some OCZ vertex2 SSD's for use as mirrored ZIL and L2ARC cache on my Solaris based storage box. While mucking around with them I also played with an embedded Solaris build kit, which after some modifications actually works neat for me. I'll probably switch from Eon to my own base image when I install the SSD's into the primary box, a non obvious benefit of this is kernel power management works on base Solaris, but not on Eon (with my controller/drives/whatever). I've been rethinking my storage solution over the last 6 or so months with a goal of drastically reducing power consumption and bumping the performance dramatically too. Ultimately the SSD's will end up in a newer, smaller box with fewer disks, and the big kahuna box will not be on 24x7 anymore (and it's mirror obviously won't be either). Until that happens though, the new Solaris image hopefully will save some power with kernel power management and the SSD's will improve both read and write performance.

Riding off the back of that is a new desktop idea too. Since I switched to Linux full time a few months back, the atom+nvidia ion system has performed well, but not quite well enough for my use. So I'm toying with a real upgrade to that and will consolidate my VM's onto this box, so it'll have lots of ram. In the mean time, I'll try an SSD in the atom and see if that improves it much/at all. Most of the time I think it's IO bound, except when you know it's not - video playback (h264 is 99% ok thanks to the ion chip but everything else is so close but so far). The rest of the time when you know it's CPU bound, there's nothing you can do because although it's a dual core with hyperthreading it's still not capable of out-of-order execution and is only 1.6ghz (clocked to 1.9ghz I think). Still, for general use, it's an awesome box, and uses around 45w from the wall.

Oh no, with this I might be over my quota for words this week. All I've ever wanted was an honest week's pay for an honest day's work.

The time has come to do what I've been saying for along time. Anyone who knows me probably won't believe me because I've been saying it for so long. But the time is now. If you don't know me, you won't know what the hell I'm talking about. Sweet justice isn’t it. Stay tuned.

A while ago I was going to put my fairly large post up about the internet filtering stuff, but I couldn't quite complete my argument for my point of view without seeming to support dodgy stuff. So instead I'll just link to it's time to tell mum because that's got the same point of view put up way better.

So the Menzies classic was fun. Somehow I managed to get second place in the D grade Criterium and actually won money. About 8-10 minutes in I got frustrated with being blocked and kept mostly at the back of the group by the other riders and somehow managed to find enough energy to not only pass one or two, but to pass the whole pack, and launch off towards the break away where Matt was at the time. That little manoeuvre nearly burnt me out so a lap or 2 of recovery behind Matt and we went to work on it. After quite a few laps Matt was dropping back and somehow I managed to stay out there, solo, chasing after the leader, for what seemed like an eternity. Another rider managed to escape the pack and bridge to Matt and then eventually to me, she passed me for a lap or 2 which gave me a much needed rest but I was able to regain second place. Between us it was a sprint finish for second/third and I managed a 1 second lead by the official timings, but it was surely less and wasn't much more than a bike length or so. The data logged off the Garmin was amazing, apart from it lapping on the up and back not just the up of the course. Note: Average HR: 186 bpm for nearly 29 minutes. Wot tha !

The following day was the actual Menzies classic race. Basically a 132km sprint. We left Kalgoorlie on the bus with a wet forecast and someone on the bus said they'd done the ride 15 times and it had never rained. That clearly jinxed it, because from at least half way to Menzies it was wet, and it was raining in Menzies on arrival, and didn't stop while we were there. The gutters were flowing and there were pools of water in the road. It was cold and wet. So we spent an hour or so sitting on the bus to keep warm and out of the rain, before setting off at 10am. Thoughts running through my mind over the first 5 km where along the lines of what the hell have I done, why am I here, what am I doing and so on. Before the official start on the neutral section lead out, we got splashed with red mud (Kalgoorlie White as its known) all over our glasses, computers and what was clean team kit. I don't exactly remember when it stopped raining and when I stopped being cold (fingertips especially), but by about 30km out we were working quite well as a group, cruising at about 40km/hr. The pace granularly slowed slightly as we went and it bumped up about 5km/hr back to 40 around the time C grade caught us at about the 75km mark. When B grade caught us at about the 95km mark the speed jumped again. From when C caught us, I was just able to hang on the back, and with B it was even harder. The group was surging to try to shake us off, and it very nearly succeeded, but with the slow downs between various inclines (there's no hills out there) we were able to grab the tail of the group again. If it wasn't for a guy crashing into a road sign about 1-2 km from the finish I would have been in the first main pack across the line, instead I was about 10 seconds behind. Still I was 39th across the line, and 16th for D grade. Not bad for a first go. Matt managed to win one of the interim sprints and got cash for that too. I've got no doubt that this would have made a nice bump to my average speed for the year. Averaging over 40km/hr for 132km is no easy task. So for what started out with me in a never again mood I finished quite pleased and will return next year to try to improve my result.

Now for an iinet support update. Reporting a no dial tone fault resulted in it being resolved for less than 5 days before the fault reoccurred. Of course I was not informed when it was fixed; we wouldn't want to communicate with the customer after all. Logged the fault again, and after a few more phone calls they were able to fix it on the second go however the Telstra tech booked for 8-12 arrived after 12 and took quite a while to trace the fault and fix it. Epic fail, but it is iinet.

The Tour de France is on again, and to make sure I didn't miss any of it, I setup a quick mythtv box. Using the PlayTV usb dual HD tuner on Fedora 13 was remarkably easy, and the box is running mostly ok. I still heavily dislike the overly complicated application that myth has become, to me it's gone down the same bad road that poopnuke and so on did. Way too many modular features of varying quality. Poopnukes issue was poorly (insecurely) written modules and overly complicated design to support these modules. On the surface myth looks the same. Perhaps I'll dig deeper; really all I want is a basic PVR (record, watch, schedule, EPG etc) and local media playback (video, music). Local - none of this DLNA bullshit, just plain NFS mounts from my NAS box. Really I don't even care much about the PVR bit, it's a nice to have. First off I'd ditch all this BS about weather, applications and so on. Reminds me of an old African saying my Dad told me; The more you have; the move problems you have.

I’m still watching a fair bit of TV too. Curb Your Enthusiasm has grown on me. New seasons of Eureka and Warehouse 13 have started; I'm yet to start watching either. Top Gear is awesome as usual. I'm slowly working my way through Treme, it's good, but hard to explain why. I'm hoping it comes together towards the season end like The Wire did.

Oh one last thing. I made the team for the Tour de Timor. So I went out and bought a mountain bike for riding on dirt. Only taken it out a few times so far, and it feels like driving a big rig or a boat. I’m trying to come up with a suitably nautical name. Something like the SS Wally.

PS: word of the year so far, by a very long shot is: Credenza.