This past weekend, Ben and I drove North for some mountain biking. We stayed at my Grandparent's lakehouse on Lake Rabun, and drove up to Tsali in North Carolina on Saturday morning. Unfortunately we didn't plan super well and the two trails there I wanted to ride (the left and right loops) are Horse-only on Saturdays, but this turned out not to be much of a mistake. We rode Mouse Branch first including the optional scenic overlook portion, and it was pretty nice. The trail was a bit crowded and some people going at a leisurely pace didn't want to let anyone pass them, but we managed to finish the 9.7 miles in under an hour which is pretty fast for us. (The woman that won the gold in Olympic mountain biking this year averaged 12mph if I remember right.) After PBJs, we did a lap on Thompson Loop which was awesome. The first part is very fast singletrack, then a lot of climbing, and then one of the longest and fastest downhill sections of singletrack I've ever ridden (elevation graph). 25mph on a mountain bike for a couple of minutes feels pretty fast! So of course, we had to ride that loop again for a total of ~25 miles for the day and as many hours on the trail as it took us to drive there.

On Sunday, we drove the 15 minutes from the lakehouse to the Stonewall Falls Loop in Clayton, GA. From reading around online, I didn't know quite what to expect. There was only one car in the gravel parking lot and no real signage, but we hopped on our bikes and set out. The first 7 miles or so seemed like they were all uphill, and for the first time in a while I actually had to walk up a few sections, but we were rewarded with the second 7 miles that were mostly downhill. I don't need to ride this again, but probably will if I'm at the lake for more than a day. Ben really liked it, so you might! It was "real" mountain biking with almost every kind of terrain: rocks and dirt, slowly recovering forest fire areas, flat trail following a stream with several stream crossings, super sketchy downhill sections on powerline cuts, banked turns, sand, narrow cuts through heavy undergrowth, steep uphills, etc. I like trails that are a little more consistent so that I can get in the appropriate "zone" for the trail, and this one kept me on my toes. My arms are a bit scratched up from all the bushes, and my shoes are still drying out, but if you're comfortable on a mountain bike and in the area this trail is worth trying. Our loop ended up being a little over 13 miles and took us about 2 hours.

These were the first mountain bike rides I've done of the length I was used to before the whole collarbone thing, and while it's nice to be back on that bike again, I still have some catching up to do in the mountains and on the track! Since Feb 1st this year, 1593 miles on road rides, 230 on casual ones, 822 on a trainer, 125 on the mountain bike, and 108 at the track.

Another year, another Gallery Developer Conference somewhere awesome, and this year it was an excuse to take some extra vacation days from work and explore. So on July 10th, San and I hopped on a plan to Amsterdam. After a slightly uncomfortable flight due to a large group on a youth ambassador trip that decided not to sleep on the overnight flight, we arrived and found our way to the hotel to meet up with the rest of the Gallery group. I won't walk through everything here, but will point out some highlights from the trip. Read on to the full post for all the details!

Tomorrow afternoon, I'm off to Amsterdam for the 4th annual Gallery developers conference. Last year in San Francisco was pretty great, and though the crowd will be a little smaller in Amsterdam, we should have a pretty good time! After that, San and I head to Paris for close to a week of tourism there, including seeing the end of the last stage of the Tour de France.

If you need to get in touch with me for any reason, just send me and email and I promise I'll go through each and every one when I get back! If something is urgent, send me an email and then send a text message to my cell phone. I should be able to receive those there, and I'll get in front of a computer if I need to.

As of the 2nd, I'm 24 now. It's not really any different than any other day, but this is the first birthday I've had after being done with school, having a real job, owning a house, etc, so thats kinda neat.

Some spoils:

• Shed from the parents for storing yard tools, etc
• Leatherman Skeletool from San
• LEGOs from San
• Daniel J. Boorstin Reader from parents
• Guitar Hero: Legends of Rock for Wii with 2 Guitars from Roger/Ben/Frank/Kurt/Me
• 5 Pizzas from San
• Something unknown in the mail from my brother. Will update here when it gets here -> Antitrust DVD and a book "Stuff White People Like"
• Entirely too many facebook wall, etc, posts from lots of people

I'll probably get me a Dell MD1000 for my hosting setup sometime in the next month or two, but that's not really birthday related.

Last weekend was spent in Destin, FL with San and some of her relatives. I took a few pictures and the good ones are here. These include some of my first fireworks pictures that aren't awful. The gorillapod worked out pretty well but next time, perhaps I'll remember my remote shutter release.

In 2 Weeks I'll be in Amsterdam for the 4th Galery Developer Conference, and then it's off to Paris. While I've been to both before, hanging out with Gallery people in Amsterdam will be a lot of fun, and I'm managing to squeeze in seeing the final stage of the Tour de France in Paris! Expect many pictures.

I had my last set of X-Rays yesterday and while it's very obvious where the break was, it's mostly healed and I can perhaps try some mountain biking again soon! I posted about my new road bike exactly a month ago, and in that month I've put 500 miles on it. Every morning during the week except Wednesdays I ride for ~2 hours, usually with a few other people, and on weekends I try to do ~3 hours twice. Sunday I rode out to Stone Mountain and did a lap around it before coming back, usually it's just a turnaround point, and in the mornings I've followed green arrows marked with "safari" (turned out to be ~25 mile tour to 8 parks with some hunting for the route at each one), gone on known routes such as the Outback Bikes Wednesday night ride route, and come up with a few of my own including one that is definitely going to be a regular route and put online somewhere. It's great to not be stuck inside on the trainer any more!

In related news, the Faster Mustache race team had our first organizational meeting last night. We're doing very well in lots of races: everything from 3rd place in an expert levels trials competition, to taking the vast majority of top 10 finishes in sport level mountain bike racing, to winning both our category and overall at a 24 hour mountain bike race in Conyers, GA. However, sponsorships have been very slow! If you'd like your name on our website, it only takes $25 and for $250 and up, you can have things like: your company linked to from our website, your logo on our jerseys, your logo on our tents and banners at races, etc! Please get in touch with me if you'd like to know more about sponsoring our team! Just email team@fastermustache.org! Every little bit helps because the team covers 50% of entry fees for people that commit to 10 races a season, and races cost between $20 and $100 a person to enter.

I've been participating at DP Challenge off and on for a while now, but my images have rarely finished in the top 50% of challenges. (here's my profile there) Photography is a very subjective thing and the end result of everyones votes can be surprising! I was fairly confident with my entry into the Bicycles II challenge:

but as voting went progressed, it swung around between 4.9 (more typical for me) to 6.8 (a possible first place!). Could I win for once? After the week of voting, I ended up in 15th place out of 135, which is in the top 10%! That works for me. I like first place and tenth place better than mine, but if it was up to me, I would have given myself third :)

Hopefully I'll start doing this more regularly, if only they'd offer and RSS feed of new challenges!

I take a lot of pictures. I figure I should post them on here. Here goes one. This is a HDR of the trees in my backyard:

(If you see a "used without permission" watermark on the image in your feed reader, please let me know in a comment or by email, so that I can add it to the list of allowed referrers!)

I just realized that my yahoo profile is now over 10 years old! I apparently created it on February 12, 1998, and while I know that I had AOL at home before that for perhaps around a year, I can't find any indication that they provide account creation dates anywhere in their system. (And back before AIM was properly integrated, I had to switch from ckdake to theckdake when we canceled AOL and didn't get to switch back to ckdake until perhaps college?)

Before AOL, I got online once or twice at a friends house, but I know my first experience online was at the 99X booth at some olympic experience thing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics. They had a web browser, I typed in "games" in the address bar and alas, couldn't get to any games. Needless to say I didn't realize that the internet was good to have until later.

In 1999, I purchased my first domain name: ithought.org (for $70 a year or something stupid expensive from Network Solutions) and it's still the one I use for all my servers. ckdake.com finally showed up in 2004.

Things sure have come a long way in ~12 years!