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So far I’ve written about one novel, a non-fiction book,  a short story, and a film.

I haven’t abandoned this blog, although I realize that my posts have been sparse lately. I’m still commuting to school by bike most of the time.

On a personal note, I’m a senior now, which is sort of hard to believe. I’ve been in and out (mostly out) of college since 1998, so finishing has felt unattainable. But now it’s within reach. Amazing.

I even changed my major (again) and declared a minor. Now I’m a Telecommunications major, focusing on video production, with an Informatics minor. There are a lot of amazing things going on at IU right now (including internationally renowned film director Werner Herzog visiting) and although I’m looking forward to being done with school, I am absolutely making the most of it.

I am also in the planning stages of a documentary. There’s no guarantee that it will get made, but I have high hopes. So I have a lot going on right now.

How is everyone else doing?

A combination of inspiration from Noah, being back in school, taking a “CyberSecurity” class, and getting a Netbook for school led me to try something different with my commute: Warbiking! Noah’s explanation of Warbiking (or WarCycling, as he calls it) is better than what I would come up with on my own, so I’m going to steal it. In this post, he says:

Wardriving: The act of driving around with scanning equipment, searching for wireless networks (usually of the 802.11 variety). The “War” part of the name comes from the age-old practice of setting up a computer to aggressively dial thousands of phone numbers in a row, looking for other computers or fax machines, or “War Dialing”. In and of itself, wardriving is not a malevolent practice. Wardriving, done passively, is totally legal in the US.

WarCycling, then, is the same tactic applied while riding a bicycle.

Current update

Warbiking is something I’ve been doing on and off since I wrote that. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s astounding how many networks you find. I know intuitively that there are thousands of wireless networks all around me, but it’s something else to see them all enumerated on a map.

I post the networks I find on wigle.net, a community site with a database that includes data about millions of wireless access points around the world.

This badge shows stats about what networks I’ve found. I added it to the sidebar of this blog:

Warbiking Setup

I started out using my Netbook running Linux, hooked to my Garmin eTrex Venture GPS. This works quite well and collects a lot of information about the networks. I now have an Android phone, so now I can use the Wigle WiFi app on my phone for warbiking/walking/etc. The Netbook is more accurate, collects more data, and probably sees more networks (though I haven’t done a direct comparison to verify this). But my phone is always with me, making it easy to start checking out wireless networks any time I want, without carrying the (relatively) bulky netbook.

Here you can see the Netbook/GPS on the left, and the Android phone on the right.

More recently, I’ve experimented with setting cameras up to take a photo every few seconds. I intend to try to correlate the photos with the network data, but I haven’t had a chance to do so yet.

One thing that’s very interesting is to load the data in Google Earth. I can then explore the networks within the Google Earth interface. Kismet even shows what clients were connected to the networks at the time I rode by.

But, halfway through last month, the wheels came off. Not literally, mind you, but my workload picked up to the point where once again, the only riding I was doing was commuting.

And now my classes are over but now I have a lot of catching up to do on actual paying work, plus my internship. So I’m working from home, and doing video editing on the side, also from home. I haven’t been on the bike at all in a week. I decided not to go on the tour, mostly because I have so much work to do, but I also failed to get in shape for it. And money. There’s always the money issue.

Anyway, all is not lost. I did ride 371 miles in July, which is more than I would have ridden if I hadn’t set out to ride 500. And school starts in two weeks so I’ll be back to commuting. I’ll try to fit some riding in between now and then, but I won’t have time for anything significant.

I’m still trying to get used to the idea that cycling is going to have to remain in the back seat, at least until I finish school. I’m loving school but sometimes I wish it weren’t so all-consuming. That said, it should be a very interesting school year. More on that later.

I had planned to ride early in the morning, but I woke up to find that a long string of storms was coming through the area. I don’t mind rain but didn’t want to head out into a big storm system. I went back to sleep. I got up later, and the rain had stopped, but this ride almost didn’t happen. I sort of forced myself out the door. I decided to take the Trucker as I have not done a lot of long rides on it lately and I wanted to do some training on it.

It had stopped raining by the time I rode, but there were still a lot of threatening clouds. I love cloudy days so I was thrilled that we had some lower temperatures and some clouds. A break from the scorching sun.

I climbed Victor Pike, something I hadn’t done for a while. It’s a lot of climbing and I felt very sluggish on the Trucker. You can’t hammer up hills on it. It’s a slow, gradual spin.

Rockeast Road was beautiful, but the pavement was awful.

After  a while I was on State Road 54, a very low-traffic highway that was also quite flat.

Complete with some good views.

I stopped in Cincinnati, Indiana, hoping to refill my water bottles, but the gas station there had gone out of business.

I passed a small library in eastern Greene County.

A fire station with a vending machine provided water.

Soon I was on State Road 43, which had nice pavement and some flat sections but also some large hills. It’s also an incredibly beautiful ride. Great scenery and very low traffic.

Here is the climb up to Solsberry, Indiana, once a railroad town.

Here, 43 winds between two grassy hills, brown from the drought.

The flat sections of 43 provided some breaks from the climbing. The sun came out for a while.

I stopped at the R&J Grocery store for some more water and a snack. It didn’t look open at first, but when I peered inside I could see some people in there.

I also rode a brief stint in Owen County, but soon it was back to Bloomington.

It ended up being a hilly 46-mile ride or so. It was kind of a tough day on the Trucker. I wasn’t struggling exactly most of the time, but I just felt anemic, especially on the climbs. Riding downhill was wonderful though, the Trucker is a fantastic descender.

With the low-mileage year I’ve had, I was quite happy to get out for a longer ride.

So far, it’s mostly been rides under 35 miles, but I’m planning on extending that soon, heat be damned. I’ve done about a thousand different variations on my “water works” route, and a few other routes I’ve ridden before. I need to sit down sometime and just dream up some new training routes, as I’m getting tired of doing the same ones over and over, even with all the variations I’ve tried.

It’s been incredibly hot and dry (drought). We nearly set a high temperature record last week when it was 105°F one day. Many fields are brown and dry from the lack of rain.

Some folks on Google+ are doing a “500 miles in July” challenge, which I have decided to do. A couple years ago, a 500-mile month wouldn’t have been a big deal (my best month ever was over 700 miles) but this year is different. In June I only rode 234 miles, so it’s definitely going to require some work to hit 500 this month. I’m off to a good start.

All this is leading somewhere, too. A significant, challenging and exciting cycling undertaking next month. I hope I can be ready for it. More on this later.

Prior to the telephone, there was no available method of voice communication over long distances. Nor was there any available method of synchronous communications across long distances. If you wanted to communicate over a distance, the fasted available method was the telegraph, but you had to travel to an office to send a message, and it took quite a while to send, and a response might be long in coming. The same communication could be carried out in real time, from home, over the phone, in just a few minutes.

This year, we went to McCormick’s Creek State Park and hiked Trail 7. We had only hiked this trail once before, way back in 2007 if my memory is correct.

Here is mom, just starting down Trail 7.

The trail starts out following a ridgetop alongside the gorge that contains the creek and waterfall, with some nice rock outcroppings where you can look out over the ravine.

Naturally, my nephew, Avery, went right to the edge.

We also had a couple nice views of the creek.

Including a great place to throw rocks …

Next we walked on a boardwalk across a muddy area thick with foliage.

Before long, we reached the White River.

From there, the trail looped back toward the start.

I had forgotten how great this trail is, with some diverse views and enough ups and downs to be interesting, but not overly strenuous.

More importantly, it was a fun way to spend Mother’s Day. I hope my mom enjoyed it as much as I did.

One fun story: my rear tire had been slipping around a bit and I was riding along somewhat absent-mindedly, thinking about what was going on with my tire when I stuck my knee out too far in a turn and smacked it on a tree. I heard a CRACK! sound echo through the woods. Oddly enough my knee is fine, so I guess I broke the tree …

We did a variation on our “secret night ride” route we’ve done a few times before (see here and here). It was an excellent ride. Even though it’s not long in terms of distance, we certainly got our share of adventure as we rolled through the woods on muddy, puddle-riddled trails, listening to the coyotes yipping and howling and the whippoorwills whippoorwilling. We watched toads hopping across the trail in our headlight beams, and later, spider eyes glimmering back at us.

One of the route changes involved climbing up on an old eroded horse trail which we had ridden down before, which was difficult enough. However,  climbing it was another story, as we discovered. The trail was steep and the ground wet and slick and we had to push our bikes up for quite some time.

It was also Cinco de Mayo, and Dave had the presence of mind to bring some margaritas in his backpack. Drinking margaritas in the middle of the woods at night was a blast.

An amazing moment occurred as we flew downhill on a gravel road toward a lake, seeing the supermoon rising over the lake with the incredibly loud sounds of buzzing, chirping insects and croaking toads enveloping us.

It was very much the kind of ride I needed. Fun, with a sense of adventure but without being too epic, and great company to top it off. I need more rides like this one!

I’m still here, but school and my contract work have been keeping me busy. I haven’t been riding much. I was at least commuting most of the time through late February, but then I got out of the routine of commuting by bicycle for most of March. I did manage a couple road rides during that time, but nothing else. Instead of riding to class, I took the bus a lot, and sometimes even drove (due to an odd set of circumstances, we ended up with a second car, so driving is an option for me now, although parking is expensive near campus).

A number of my bike/blog friends are doing 30 Days of Biking during April, that is, riding every single day in April. I’m not doing that, but I have at least started commuting every day again. I’m a creature of habit, and I feel like I’m already back in my riding routine.

One thing that is interesting to note is that there is a massive amount of construction in Bloomington right now. Anywhere you drive, the construction is an obstacle. However, my bike commute route is completely unaffected. I guess those low-traffic roads just don’t need as much work, and they are less likely to be undergoing “improvement.”

I’ve also been having a few health issues, nothing serious but enough to prevent me from riding at times. Nothing serious, I think, but I have a doctor’s appointment coming up, so hopefully we can figure out some of the problems I’ve been having.

School is great, I’m loving it and learning a whole lot. It is, however, sapping all my energy. I almost got out for a ride on Sunday but then had to spend the day working on stuff for a project. I’m hoping I can get out for something more than a commute soon.