This time no technical kind of thing, the last months I’ve been working on an update of a website which I voluntary manage for my athletics club (www.av56.nl). I rewrote my simple own MVC framework to the well know CodeIgniter framework. And except that, I’ve been biking quite a lot too. Especially since I bought a road bike (Giant TCR Advanced 2) next to my mountainbike (Cube Reaction).
That biking crazyness has now been changed into a new adventure called Duchenne Heroes. In short some facts:
- 7 days of mountainbiking
- 100 km each day
- 10.000 altimeters
- 4 countries
- 4 people per team
And that all with just one main goal, collecting money for the Duchenne foundation. A good description can be read on wikipedia about what Duchenne is. The idea came up after a few beers (always the guilty one 
) with some friends and since last saturday, our team of four people is a fact! We started creating a website this week but there’s a lot of work left: clubjegoes.nl
So, keep an eye on our website if you’re interested or even better, donate money to our team. We need 10.000 euro in total. We’re now busy thinking about how to create special sponsor packages. And not unimportant, start training since this is one of the toughest tours in the Benelux.
My next will soon be published, it’s about the Dutch NLJUG day called JFall which I attended last wednesday. It’s a conference of the Dutch Java user group. I’ll briefly describe the subjects I followed and try to dig into them later. Especially the new Java 7 improvements have my attention, awesome new stuff designed for multi core processors and cloud computing!
Some weeks ago I bought the Garmin Edge 705. It’s THE gps device for biking. It’s waterproof, has a heart rate and cadence monitor. You can compare it with a TomTom but with a lot more features specialized for biking. More info here: Garmin.
Example picture:
The only thing I didnt like, where the maps which you need to actually use the gps. For example, a map for the Netherlands costs you around 130 Euro. But there’s also a free alternative which is even better but you’ll have to do some research and reading. One of the sites which helped me a lot is openmtbmaps.org, this is based on the openstreetmaps which are free maps maintained by you and me (I really like that, just like Open Source Software). Openmtbmaps is more dedicated to mountainbiking, meaning other rendering of the map and extra info like difficulty.
Enough about the gps system and maps, now the results! Two weeks ago I went for a holiday to the Black Forest in the southern part of Germany. I uploaded maps to my edge 705 and included some tracks from gpsies.com (amazing site too). Once there, I also bought an old fashioned paper based map including some routes at the local store.
I have biked several tracks but a nice (and heavy) one I would like to use as an example. It was a track over 60 kilometers and more then a thousand meters of climbing. I’m still experiencing with all the software and converting of thousand standards in maps world (gpx, kml, kmz, tcx etc), so there are some strange details in the charts below. Like the straight lines in google maps and the max speed of 20 km/h in the last chart. Yes, I’m sure that I biked harder . With a max of 55 km/h.
So the experiencing is still not over and my Edge 705 has a lot of unused features. Time to go biking again!
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