Trying to ride home yesterday after a long pause (due to nothing but laziness and good excuses!) I found myself with a flat and no tools. How stupid is that?
That’s how I found out that I average 18 mph on the way home on the bike, and just 3.6 mph walking… 🙂
That’s one book that came with high praise!
Only the Paranoids Survive is the kind of book you have to have read to be able to keep up with everyone else that constantly talks about it. And like any required reading, I was a little uncomfortable with this one, trying to fend it off and push it away as long as I could.
The first chapter than did it for me. A long rant about things that I already intimately knew, with definitions of things that were absolutely obvious: PLEASE!
Turns out that what was so familiar to me actually required definition, and that from that first chapter of setting the stage, the book soon entered incredibly valuable territory. Grove charted what was tantamount to one of the most radically success stories in today’s business world, proving how there was method behind the choices that Intel had made.
All in all, the book was an amazing read. FInding out that Grove’s team thinks of conflict in meetings as a way of expressing creativity was refreshing, considering the level and ‘nice’ way of behaving in the Valley. That there actually had been a major crisis in the company BEFORE the Pentium debacle; not only had I forgotten that, I was reminded by the book that it was quite a terminal danger for the company.
Towards the end, the book starts looking at the present and past, and starts reading like Nostradamus’s prophecies. As long as they talk about the past, everything is in perfect order and logic reigns supreme; but as soon as the then present and the then future are concerned, predictions are random and arbitrary and ultimately, in hindsight, plain wrong.
The one chapter on the Internet is particularly interesting, given that the book was published in 1998. It shows, at least, that indeed Intel must accept better judgement, since the company did not follow the predictions of the chairman.
The language of the book is very narrative and gets lost only when Grove talks about abstract things or the future. As many leading business people, he is best where he is comfortable, and his passion surely comes out best when he talks about Intel and Intel’s achievements.
Oh – the title: it is meant in a much nicer way than I had interpreted first. Sounds like ‘Only the Paranoids Survive’ just means: ‘Watch Out, Or They’ll Eat You’. Nothing of the world conspiracy that it seemed to imply.
All in all a ‘must read’ for people in the computer business. Or people stuck in a culture in which consensus is a must, niceness a requirement, and hence everything needs to be dumbed down.
I finally got to implement combined graphs in Perl. In the end, it was real simple, and it was mostly fighting with GD::Graph that held me up.
The new graphs have a few implementation changes that I found really important:
1. The scale of x and y coordinates is constant, so that you can compare two graphs directly. Right now, if you do a mostly flat ride, it looks like a mountain climb no matter what. If you ride twice as far, you end up with sharp mountains. Combined, a long flat ride looks like a short mountain pass. Needed to fix that, will increase motivation… 🙂
2. Data points are not as interesting as averages as far as speed is concerned. Changed that, too – speed is now averaged, and speed points are added on top.
3. I combined several workouts to generate a single graph. The old problem of the lazy biker that stops to look at the mountains (and catch breath) and then moves on, realizing that his/her Polar stopped and requires a new workout (bitch bitch)
4. I finally got rid of the speed spikes. I know that it seems absolutely possible to you, but I do think that riding on a flat at 65 mph is a bit unrealistic. So the code now throws out those values automatically and replaces them with the average of the adjoining data points (or undefs them, whichever I implemented 🙂
Saturday, and for some mysterious reason no desire to ride. Maybe it’s the broken espresso machine, maybe it was the ton of chocolate I ate yesterday, freshly spurred by a visit to Albertson’s.
Still, I made it all the way to Canada. Turned around at the intersection where they usually stop traffic on Sundays, because it was turning greyish after that.
I was out at the same time as the Alto Velo B ride. What a nightmare those guys are: pass you downhill, then start rushing around you, just in time to slow down on the next uphill, where I have to pass them again. Can’t anyone tell them how you pass when you are in a big group?
Tiredness overcame me yesterday. It was a long day, and I got out of the office only after 7:30. While I had started on the path of doing an extra circle riding home on Monday, Tuesday saw me barely crossing the traffic light on Foothill to get home just in time to feast on a ton of chocolate.
Interesting how work can work that way! Monday was intense, and Tuesday even worse – and as a consequence, my energy level sinks…
I managed to go all the way to the end of Canada and back. I started out late, thinking I would barely be able to make it to Woodside, but then I saw someone I vaguely recalled from work, got curious and followed him to the end of Canada. I think he’s a colleague, but I wouldn’t know how to tell.
The ride was a Sunday ride, barely made it either way, although the averages are not as bad as they should have been. On the way home, I felt as if my legs would fall apart – and that’s with 7000ft ascent in two days. I think I’ll have to train a lot before I can make it up Haleakala…
Finally I integrated the log generation with htmltree – now this is really a totally Marco tool, who else will want to do anything with a training log?
I was thinking of changing my way and packaging up the special handlers – images and training – so that they can be added later as packages, instead of being bloat to the main app…
Today I went with two collegues of mine for a long ride. I started from here, rode the hour or so to Woodside, and joined the two. From there we did an Old La Honda, then down to 84, left of Alpine, down on Page Mill, finally to Woodside and back. All in all four hours.
The two guys are really wonderful to ride with. They may not think the same of me, but they need to get in a few good rides until they meet a bunch of their friends in France. They are going to stay there during the Tour, and I get to train them!
Riding home was a pure bitch! The wind was very strong and wore me out on Manila. I got to the intersection totally exhausted…
I spent again a few needless moments in the morning trying to make the best out of my precarious programming skills and dabbled on an alternative to srdplot.
Not that I don’t like srdplot – it generates very pretty graphs that seem just to be made for public display. It’s just that it’s a C application, and it reads only .srd files. I added support for Windows .hrm files, but that still left me without the possibility of generating graphs for combined exercises.
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