UltraRob's Adventures

Last Saturday we went up to the Cripple Creek Ice Festival. There were some amazing sculptures. There was an ice maze and sledding for the kids. Out kids really enjoyed it. It is still going on this weekend and would make a fun trip for locals. Check the website for details.

I took several photos of the ice carvings. I also did a page that shows the carving of a moose sculpture and then using fire to give it a frosted glass look.

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Mens Sub Zero SL Parka Price: $295.00

Ptarmigan Parka Regular Price: $220.00 $149.95 on sale

Labels: Colorado, miscellaneous

The last few weeks I've been working on a much needed new design for UltraRob.com. I've started on it a few times in the past but never had the time to get it done. I got laid off from my job a few weeks ago so I've had more time. It's hard to believe though the time I'm spending looking for a new job in the current recession.

The design still isn't anything fancy but I think it's a big improvement from the old one. I'd love to hear what you like and what you don't.

The only change here on UltraRob's Adventures until last night was the header. I worked on the new design on the blog last night until I ran out of brain cycles. I still have a bit of tweaking to do on it.

I changed the home page, about page, most of the photo pages and some other pages over the last couple weeks. I still have the cycling and outdoor gear pages, a few older photo pages and some miscellaneous pages to change to the new design.

How are the changes looking so far?

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Burton Clash Snowboard All Mountain Price: $329.95

Burton Clash Snowboard 160 Mens Price: $329.95

Labels: blog design, miscellaneous

Balancing Point from DANNY BROWN on Vimeo.

This video has amazing rock stacking and balancing. I'm really not sure how it was created. I'm trying to just enjoy it and not spend too much time figuring it out.

The North Face STH 2 Jacket Price: $199.00

The North Face Redpoint Jacket Price: $149.00

The North Face Denali Jacket Regular Price: $165.00 $129.90 on sale

Labels: miscellaneous

A couple months ago, I wrote that my brother-in-law was in the hospital with cancer. One of my long training rides for the Leadville 100 was to Denver to see him in the hospital. Unfortunately he never came home from the hospital. He passed away a little over a week ago.

This past week we had relatives staying with us. Not only was it tough with the funeral but other things kept going wrong. First the basement sink clogged. Next as we were leaving for the viewing, the panic alarm on the van went off and wouldn't stop until I disconnected the battery.

Then we started having the sewer backing up. We were ready to leave for the grave side service when my 5 year old said it was backing up again. I ran down and started vacuuming it up with the shop vac. I took out 16 gallons of water and it was still coming. It turned out one of the toilets had stuck on.

Hopefully the coming week will be a little calmer. I will be adjusting to working from home full-time. The company I work for laid off some in our local office a few weeks ago. There are now only 6 of us left here and we will be telecommuting full time. There are certainly some positives to that but also some downsides.

The North Face STH 2 Jacket Price: $199.00

The North Face Redpoint Jacket Price: $149.00

The North Face Denali Jacket Regular Price: $165.00 $129.90 on sale

Labels: miscellaneous

Dave Moulton tagged me (his blog has moved to new location)to write six little known random things about myself. He was tagged by Ron at Cozy Beehive which is another blog I read.

I've been tagged a couple times before. The other times I was tagged it was for 5 things. It seems the meme has been growing in the last year.

I started writing this nearly 2 weeks ago but just couldn't find the inspiration to come up with little known things about me. I revealed enough last time. In the meantime the Fat Cyclist was tagged.

He thought it was unimaginative and came up with a list of questions to answer. I like his new meme better so I'm switching to it.

If you could have any one — and only one — bike in the world, what would it be?

I prefer not to have needless constraints. There are enough real ones without making more.

Do you already have that coveted dream bike? If so, is it everything you hoped it would be? If not, are you working toward getting it? If you're not working toward getting it, why not?

For me it's not about the dream bike. It's about the dream rides.

If you had to choose one — and only one — bike route to do every day for the rest of your life, what would it be, and why?

See my answer to the first question.

What kind of sick person would force another person to ride one and only one bike ride to to do for the rest of her / his life?

Some poor, unhappy person that can't stand to see other people happy. I don't think Fatty is unhappy but he is the one that came up with question ...

Do you ride both road and mountain bikes? If both, which do you prefer and why? If only one or the other, why are you so narrowminded?

I ride both. They're different tools. If I'm going to ride 200 miles on the road, I prefer my road bike. If I'm wanting to go to the middle of nowhere on single track, I prefer my mountain bike.

Have you ever ridden a recumbent? If so, why? If not, describe the circumstances under which you would ride a recumbent.

No. I'd ride a recumbent if the closest food was 20 miles away and I didn't have any other way to get there. I suppose I could run but I only do that if something large and scary is chasing me.

Have you ever raced a triathlon? If so, have you also ever tried strangling yourself with dental floss?

No, I swim just like a Rock. Straight to the bottom and that's where I stay. If I raced a triathlon, there'd be no need for me to strangle myself.

Suppose you were forced to either give up ice cream or bicycles for the rest of your life. Which would you give up, and why?

That's easy, ice cream. Ice cream is good but it's not near the top of my favorite foods.

What is a question you think this questionnaire should have asked, but has not? Also, answer it.

Have you done a solo 24 hour race? If not, what are you waiting for? If yes, when are you doing your next one?

I've done 6 solo 24 hour mountain bike races and 4 races on the road that were longer. Hopefully I'll do a long race next year.

You’re riding your bike in the wilderness (if you’re a roadie, you’re on a road, but otherwise the surroundings are quite wilderness-like) and you see a bear. The bear sees you. What do you do?

This has actually happened to me twice. Fortunately I'm scary enough looking that both times the bear ran away from me. I slammed the brakes and gave them time to get away. As fast as they ran, they didn't need much time.

Since I already had my list of 6 bloggers chosen, I'm sticking with it instead of Fatty's three. Even he couldn't stop at three.

• Matt at Two Wheeled World - Matt and I were teammates on the Schwinn/Grand West team back in the mid-90's. Now He's a fast Pro and I just like to ride slow all day and night.
• Bradly at Bicycle Frenzy - I enjoy reading Bradly's blog but he's been busy lately getting engaged and moving.
• Yeti at UpaDowna - Local guy that plays outside and likes his beer
• Geoff at Fumbling Towards Endurance - Geoff is mainly a runner but he gave the Great Divide Race a try this year.
• Alex at The Bicycle Tutor - Alex makes great bike maintenance/repair videos. If you're not sure how to take care of your bike, you should head over and check out his videos.
• Juli and/or Chuck at Ex-Racers Gone Wild - Juli and Chuck recently moved here and are enjoying exploring the area. I haven't run into them yet but maybe I'll meet them sometime.

Yeti 303 RDH Bike 2009 Price: $4700.00

Yeti ARC X CX Bike 2009 Price: $2350.00

Yeti ASR 7 Bike 2009 Price: $4440.00

Labels: cycling, miscellaneous

In my journeys around the web, I found a blog by Patrick Curl called There's a Blog in my Soup. The interesting thing about Patrick is he plans to go on a road trip this summer and interview a blogger from all 50 states and do it in 50 days. Patrick has created an American Blogger Directory that he is going to use to pick which bloggers he visits.

It would actually be more interesting if he was going to do it by bike. Alaska would be a long ride and Hawaii would be a bit of a problem. Maybe I should do it next summer. It would probably be hard though to do it in 50 days by bike.

To get more visits to his site and raise awareness of his road trip, Patrick is doing a group blogging experiment. He asked people to submit what they thought were their best post and then he picked his favorites. My post 7 Mountain Biking Confidence Killers was one of the ones selected.

Here are the other posts to see what's going on outside of cycling

• If you don't spend a lot of time online, you may not know what Twitter is. It's pretty hot with bloggers right now. Find out if it's for you or at least know what Twitter is.
• Now that you know what Twitter is, you can check out the coolest things that combine Google and Twitter.
• Hopefully you aren't looking for a job but if you are here are some beautiful resume designs.
• Dilbert is the best for describing the jobs I've had. Dilbert creator Scott Adams asked readers for humorous, derogatory descriptions of the their jobs.
• So you've had the job with one of the Dilbert job descriptions, now here are some ideas to make money online.
• Will Microsoft make up their mind on operating systems? Vista is still buggy and they're coming out next year with a new OS. Yeah, right.
• Every day hundreds of new blogs are started. Hundreds of them also seem to die. If a blog falls in the forest, will anyone care?
• No matter what our interests, there always more we want to do than time to do it Maybe it's time to cut out the things that don't really matter and focus on what does.
• Media is quickly changing. We have more information about what we care about and can get it quicker. It still doesn't mean that everything we read and hear is true.
• Battle of who has the most online friends. Does it really matter? Do you even know their real name or what they do?
• I have 3 and 5 year old daughters. Disney princesses may be great for Disney but we and our kids would be better off if we didn't have to have the latest creation.
• Flickr is a photo sharing site but you can also get feedback and learn to take better photos.

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TENT VALAIS FAMILY DOME SLEEPS 7 Price: $125.72

Eureka Sunrise 9 Family Tent 5 Person Price: $269.98

Labels: miscellaneous

This post is to test switching the blog feed to full posts from partial posts. I don't like partial posts in feeds anymore than any one else. The reason I had stayed with partial posts was the way I've done something caused problems in full posts. I've wanted to fix it for a long time but it never made it to the top of the list. Lately it's been bugging me too much and so I spent the few hours to fix it. Of course that's if I don't find out there's a problem once I post this.

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Labels: miscellaneous

Due to not getting something configured correctly when I changed servers over the weekend, the feeds for this blog and my deals blog weren't being updated. I believe the problem is now fixed.

Is anything else broken?

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KR3W Breaker Wind Jacket Mens Regular Price: $67.95 $33.98 on sale

Burton Breaker Breaker Headband Price: $8.95

Labels: miscellaneous

As I had mentioned a couple weeks ago when the hard drive crashed on my computer, I was also looking for a new host for this website. There were intermittent problems of pages loading too slow. This was most noticeable on the cycling and outdoor gear pages.

I've been working hard over the last couple weeks to move to a different hosting company. I've been testing and making tweaks to get everything to run on the new server. Today I switched the site over.

Although I've done my best to check that everything is working, it wouldn't surprise me if there's something that's not. Please let me know if you find something missing or isn't working right.

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SIDI 09 Tork Mountain Bike Shoes Price: $164.99

Shimano SH M086L Mountain Bike Shoes Price: $109.99

Labels: miscellaneous

I wish this was an April Fools joke but it's not. A couple days ago the hard drive on my desktop computer died. The computer isn't much over 4 months old. I doubt that the hard drive was poor quality but one of the tiny fraction that fail early for some unknown reason.

Dell shipped out a new hard drive yesterday and I was supposed to get it today. They called to make sure I had gotten it but I didn't. The address they say they shipped it to is my home address but somebody at my old job signed for it. I'll have to get it track it down in the morning.

So how does this affect this website? The computer that went down is the one that runs scripts a couple times a day to update the products and prices of the cycling and outdoor gear search. Hopefully I'll have it updating again tomorrow. I guess I need to set up a 2nd system to handle problems in the future. I think it would stress my current laptop so I may need to look at something else.

Another technical issue I've been having is the pages on this site are intermittently loading very slow. I've contacted my hosting company, GoDaddy, a couple times and they've been less than helpful. I've heard several bad things about their hosting from others. They say they can't do anything unless they see it happening even though I have monitoring logs that show the problem about once an hour.

I've gotten a few suggestion on good hosting providers and have been researching them. If you have any other suggestions, please let me know. Once I get my main computer back up and running, I want to get this site moved to somewhere reliable.

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Eureka Sunrise 11 Tent Price: $279.95

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Labels: miscellaneous

Thanksgiving is a good time to reflect on all we have to be thankful for. This isn't the only time of year to be thankful but I find it easy to go through life and not think how good I have it. Sure my life isn't perfect but I know there are a lot of people less fortunate.

Of course one of the things I'm thankful for is being able to do cycling and other outdoor activities. The love of the outdoors is one of the things I want to pass to my kids. My 4 year old has already hiked almost all the way up the Manitou Incline and likes to ride her bike. She says when she gets older she's going to race her bike across America. She's been asking to go skiing. My 3 year old has been enjoying riding her bike and I think she'll enjoy doing more when she gets a little older. They both like to go camping.

The Fat Cyclist wrote an excellent post about what he's grateful for. A lot of them have to do with cycling.

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Tubbs Snowshoes Womens Mountaineer Snowshoes Price: $269.95

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Labels: miscellaneous, Thanksgiving

A few times this year I've posted about my job stressing me out and also a Dilbert cartoon describing the situation at work. Although my job wasn't the only thing that kept me busy and mostly off the bike this year, it really sucked the energy from me. An anonymous poster commented the following on the Dilbert cartoon post.

I can so identify with crappy working conditions. I'll say some prayers that I read of a new job for you rather than see you in the news because you've strung up your boss by his toenails and are now forcing him/her to watch the Wiggles, Blue's Clues and Thomas the Tank in an endless loop.

The prayers have been answered and my boss wasn't forced to watch the Wiggles, Blue's Clues or Thomas the Tank.

Tomorrow is my last day at my current job and I'll start my new job next Monday. I'm excited about my new job. It's at a small company which is something I like. My new manager used to work with one of my good friends at HP. One of my co-workers has finished the Leadville 100 8 times, 6 of them on a single speed. He's currently training for the 24 Hours in the Old Pueblo. I won't have to get up from my desk to see outside and I'll have a view of Pikes Peak out the window. I'm sure there'll be some things I don't like but there's plenty of things to like about it.

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The North Face Redpoint Jacket Price: $149.00

The North Face Denali Jacket Regular Price: $165.00 $129.90 on sale

Labels: job, miscellaneous, stress

It would be impossible to describe my current job situation better than this Dilbert cartoon. I'm not sure how but it has to change soon. My health and my family are too important to let it continue. If you wonder what I do for work, you can look at my LinkedIn profile.

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Labels: job, miscellaneous, stress

View of Red Rock Canyon Open Space from my parents' house. When I was growing up, the grassy area on the left was a landfill.

I've been tagged by Fritz at Cyclelicious to tell five random facts about myself. I was also tagged in December by Biking Bis but never got a post written.

• When I was 6 months old, my mom put me in the top bunk of my brothers' bunk beds so I could watch my siblings play. My Dad had put a board across to keep my brother from falling out so she thought I'd be safe. My brother climbed up with me and his weight pushed the mattress down enough that I slipped under the board. I fell head first onto the concrete floor. My Mom saw it happened from across the room but there was nothing she could do. At the ER they couldn't find any signs of a concussion but a x-ray showed I had fractured my skull. I was kept in the hospital overnight and sent home.


• I've lived in 4 houses in my 36 years. I was only 2 when my parents moved to where they still live so I don't remember the first one


• I've been in 49 states. Guess which one I haven't been to.


• I did an unsupported solo ride of 140 miles when I was 16. It was part of a bigger trip. I rode about 130 miles to part way up Independence Pass. I met the rest of my family and we camped for 2 nights. Then I rode on over to Aspen and up to the Maroon Bells. My brother and I then climbed the Maroon Bells. We also did an overnight trip to do Pyramid Peak and 3 high thirteeners on the ridge to the south of it.
  
  The day after finishing the mountain climbing, I tried riding home. I ended up running out of daylight. I was a little less than 30 miles from home with 23 miles of downhill and a drop of 3,000 feet. I was bummed I didn't get to ride the easy part. I had thought my tires felt really low but I kept pumping them up to 100 psi. A few days later, I figured out my presta valves were stuck and I only had about 40 psi. That's when I learned to always depress the valve before pumping.


• I didn't get my drivers license until I was 18. I could get everywhere I wanted to on my bike. When I was 18, I was working for a stucco company and my boss was happy I couldn't drive the trucks out to the job sites so I got my license. My first year and a half of college, I rode 10 miles each way from my parents' house. I never missed class because of weather. Not even when it snowed 8 inches or when it was -10 degrees. Now I'm dependent on driving and don't commute by bike nearly enough.

Now it's my turn to tag 5 other bloggers. I know this meme made the rounds the end of last year on several blogs I read. I don't remember which ones and I'd rather ride my bike than spend time figuring out which ones. If you've been tagged before, I'm sorry to tag you again.

• Adventure Junkie


• Fonk


• Go Clipless


• Marni


• Velo Soiree

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Pearl Water Shorts Womens Regular Price: $45.00 $19.95 on sale

Labels: cycling, miscellaneous