Tag: bike

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general

New Bike

I’ve been commuting to the office on the BART train for a few years now. This is pretty painless except I drive a mile to the station, then pay $16 a day to park. Recently, they stopped selling reserved parking at the station by my house. They’re apparently tearing up the whole parking lot and building 750 units of housing and 50,000 square feet of commercial property. This roughly coincided with me going back to the office five days a week, so I suddenly need a new way to get to the train.

My first thought was to simply drive to another station. I tried this for a few days, going to the MacArthur station, which only costs $4 a day to park in the new garage. But that added 5-10 minutes of driving in each direction, and another 10-15 minutes of train time each way, which seemed silly. I also tried renting Lime scooters. They are all over the neighborhood, and cost maybe $4 a trip. They’re pretty quick, but after one or two trips, I knew it was when, not if. They’re pretty shaky, and I could easily see getting taken out by a pothole, of which there are many in West Oakland.

I bought a bike when RTO started in 2023, a very nice Cannondale Topstone, with thoughts that I’d ride to the Berkeley office a few days a week. I’ve honestly rode that bike exactly three times since I bought it, and none of them actual commutes. I rode it to the train a few times last month to see what my problem was, other than general laziness. I think the issue is that it’s a gravel bike with drop handlebars, and it’s entirely the wrong stance and geometry for a quick ride to work on the streets with a laptop backpack on.

I also still have the bike I bought in 2005, a Dahon Boardwalk folding bike. I think I’ve rode this bike maybe twice since I broke my arm on it in 2009. That bike has a more upright stance, but it’s also very wobbly and weird, top-heavy with tiny wheels, and it really needs a complete overhaul from sitting for 20 years. So I could pay $400 to redo a bike I don’t really like and bought for $300. Or I contemplated switching the handlebars on the Topstone, which would also require switching brakes and shifters, and I’m maybe $500 in on a project I might not like. Or I could just buy another bike.

So I did. I went to REI and picked up a Cannondale Quick CX 3. It’s a great hybrid bike, with a more upright stance and flat handlebars. It’s a very lightweight alloy frame, and pretty well equipped with the latest hardware. It has hydraulic disc brakes, which are new to me. There’s eight speeds, with a decent range for the city. The front fork has a suspension on it, but also has a quick-locking lever for when I don’t want it. Tires are grippy, but not too fat. There’s a phone mount on the stem, but otherwise the bike is all analog. And I love the color, which they call Rally Red. My Topstone is a matte stealth bomber black, which is cool. But the red is a nice contrast.

I’ve rode the new bike to the train every day last week, and it’s pretty much flawless. I had some fretting with the u-lock mount, how to keep it on the bike as I rode without making a ton of knocking noise. (I got a velcro holster thing that seems to work.) We have BikeLink lockers at the train station, which are secure enough for the day, and I u-lock it to the inside of the locker, too. It’s pretty ideal when it’s 70 and sunny out. What will it be like when it isn’t 70 and sunny? That’s a TBD.

I also went out a few times over the weekend. I’ve got 40-some miles on the bike already. I don’t know if I’m going to become a Bike Person. I can’t do spandex. I’m not anti-car enough. I’m definitely not in shape. I’ll have to work on that last one.

I also need to avoid any more gear acquisition. Work paid for the bike via our gym/fitness subsidy, which is nice. But I now spend too much time browsing forums, wondering if some new-fangled carbon fiber cargo rack will make my life complete. I need to cut that out, and just ride.

 

 

Categories
general

RTO

For the first time since September 13, 2010, I am no longer a remote-first employee. Wednesday was the first day back in the office. Well, it was the first day ever in the office for my job I started two years ago. So things are a bit interesting right now.

As per policy, I can’t talk about my employer, and none of what I say is their policy at all. I speak for myself, etc. I will need to dance around a few things here, so bear with me. I should also go back and explain a bit about why I’ve been doing this for roughly a decade longer than the rest of you.

OK, so when we got here in 2008, I was a commuter. I was actually a long-haul commuter, because I’m in the most northwest part of Oakland, and I used to work in San Jose. This was just under 40 miles, but you would be damn lucky to do it in under an hour. From fall of 2008 until spring of 2010, I did this every day. This was at Samsung, and we technically could not leave the building with our machines, use any sort of USB media, or connect to a company network from outside the building. Work from home was not a concept in the company whatsoever. I think I drove about 50,000 miles in that time period. The good news was podcasts and Audible were first becoming a big thing. The bad news was traffic got progressively worse as the internet boomed.

In 2010, my old boss Joel asked if I wanted to come back and work for him again. I said no, because I couldn’t move back to New York; I’d just bought a house. He said don’t worry about that. Work from home. Name your price. Fly out to New York once a year to eat on the company’s dime and see everyone, but otherwise he trusted me, and when could I start. Ironically, my last day was September 10th, and my first was the 13th. I installed FrameMaker in a VM, cloned the old repo I last touched in 2007, and I was fully remote for the next decade.

* * *

At my old job, it was easy to be remote. Even when we were in the same cube farm, we were largely remote, because we never talked to each other face-to-face. Joel wasn’t into meetings, and most of us sat on an internal IRC server, chatting back and forth on our day-to-day there. We were also way ahead of the curve on using Jira and wikis and all that. When half the team relocated to Boston, we barely noticed. Other than time-shifting three hours earlier to match their hours, I had no problem locking in right away. These were people I’d known for a decade, and we’d practically gone to war together. This was easy.

Well, it was until the company went sideways and everyone left. They decided to do a big “pivot to cloud” thing and I started managing and I was in this weird lurch where people wanted me to drive to Palo Alto all the time, but I’d get there and none of my team was there. I’d waste three hours fighting traffic and get to this corporate campus where everyone had an office and their doors were always shut. The ship was already sinking there, and I won’t go off on a tangent on that one.

So I jumped to the new place two years ago. Once again, I will skim over the details there, but it was fully remote. They FedEx’ed me a laptop and did everything on Zoom and Slack, and I kept powering away just as I did before, even at the same desk with the same monitor and keyboard, which was a bit weird.

* * *

Anyway. While I was gone in Vegas, an email went out, and the company went from a remote-first joint to a mandatory report-to-the-office two days a week, going up to three. There are two sides to this, and obviously as a manager I have to say this is great, and face-to-face collaboration is awesome, and something something synergy. There’s obviously some feelings about having to take time to commute to an office where none of my direct reports work and, like, talk to people. And my schedule was pretty much set up so I would start work at six in the morning, and then quit at maybe three and get a few hours of fiction writing in. It’s been a few years since that’s happened, but now it means a shift to the schedule again. I’ll shut up about this.

Wednesday was my first day back. I took the BART to Embarcadero, went to our new office, and worked all day. And I hate to sound like a return-to-office apologist, but it wasn’t bad. My commute is not horrible. The office is nice. They had lunch. But there were a few specific things that I enjoyed.

First, I have never worked in San Francisco. Honestly, in the 15 years I have lived here, I have probably only been in the city maybe two or three dozen times. I usually have maybe one or two runs into the city per year to go to a museum with an out-of-town guest or whatever. I honestly have almost no geographical knowledge of the city whatsoever. But taking the train there, getting out of the station, seeing all the tall buildings… it gave me a certain rush to feel that I was here. It reminded me of when I was a kid and would go to Chicago and have that sudden feeling that I was in a real city, that there were hundreds of thousands of people around and that things were happening.

Also, as much as I was being a contrarian about how face-to-face collaboration worked, I probably ended up straightening out more stuff before lunch than I’ve fixed in the last two years. But more than that, I need to get out of my head and get around people again. I have had this horrible interpersonal drama I can’t entirely get into, and I think a lot of it is from just ruminating around my condo, not being around people. I think a change of scenery will be good to me. I’m sure I will get sick of this once the trains start to fill up and break down. And I have no idea what to do about the writing thing. Write in the morning? Write during lunch? I don’t know. I’m not writing now, so…

* * *

The bike. So, I bought a bike. I have a choice of commuting to SF or Berkeley. The Berkeley office is closer to my house mile-wise, but it takes like an hour to get there on a bus that stops at every block. The train is ten minutes door-to-door plus the time it takes me to cover the mile or so to the station on my end. But I can bike to Berkeley in maybe a half hour, so that could be a nice way to break things up in the summer. I also got $600 of credit on exercise equipment from work, and that includes buying a bike.

I ended up buying a Cannondale Topstone 4 alloy from REI. I wanted a more commuter-oriented bike, but this gravel bike is honestly a better fit for me, and I like it a lot. Of course, I get it and the temps drop and it rains for two weeks straight. I’ve only had it out a few times, but it’s a great ride and a good way to get exercise and out of my own head a bit. Once the weather is not horrible, I’ll look at maybe going to the office once a week with it, and maybe taking it to the train station if I don’t want to take the bus.

* * *

Seems like there’s more to talk about, but those are the big parts. Sarah’s in Ireland right now, and then Spain, doing family stuff. I am solo for another week. Lots of guitar, lots of writing, I hope.

Categories
general

On breaking an arm

So last Sunday, I broke my right arm. And I am right handed. Expect a giant drop-off in my updates until I can type again.

The summary: I was riding my bike a few blocks from home. It’s all old warehouses in the neighborhood, and there are a lot of railroad side spurs that are abandoned, like with a set of rails half-buried in asphalt crossing the streets at funny angles. I remember riding next to one thinking “it would suck if my wheel fell into that groove.” Next thing I know, the bike falls out from under me, I fall to my right, I stick out my right arm, and pow. Had to ride home with a broken arm and a fucked up left knee, although I think the knee is structurally OK, just rubbed raw with the gentle touch of asphalt.

Went to the Oakland ER, which was an adventure. 7 hours of jonesing addicts thinking that if they screamed at the doctors enough, they’d get a taste. Also a Hispanic kid was in for a heart murmur or something, and his entire extended family of 768 were all in the waiting room, eating candybars and talking on cell phones right under the “no food/no cell phones” sign, as the movie Mama’s House 2 played on a TV with no channel or volume controls.

X-Rays were murder. Turns out I chipped the elbow end of the radius. Not much of a structural issue – you can’t set it or put screws or a plate in it, it pretty much fixes itself. But in the meantime, lots of swelling, lots of nerves focused in that area, and the arm doesn’t want to bend, and the wrist can’t turn. I got this space-age fiberglass instant-mold splint that I ace bandage on, and can take off to shower (thank you – heat waves and plaster casts don’t mix.) Also got some vicodin and a sling. I missed a day of work – I can drive now, and my left handed typing and mousing slowly improves. I have to slowly wean out the splint over the next few weeks – should be AOK in a month or so.

I did this same thing in 1992 on my left arm. No space age cast then, though. And I only had codeine syrup for pain. But that was my left hand. And computers didn’t involve as much mouse work then. I don’t know how you one-armed people deal with Windows on a daily basis.