Jeff Urban, when he’s not racing with us, takes very cool photos. When he is racing with us, his wife Jen takes very cool photos. One of them took this one of me climbing to the top at Ojai last week.
Please note: by the time this photo was taken, I was about a zillion miles behind the field. I was not working this hard to catch up; I was working this hard just to finish.
When you race in a criterium, you’re supposed to keep up with the main pack. You save energy drafting off the guy in front of you, and the farther toward the front, the less energy you spend yo-yoing after everyone. If you fall behind and are about to be lapped, the race officials will pull you. You become a hazard, the slow guy poking along in the fast lane.
Now, if you’re like me and are way the hell behind, it’s easy for the refs to make the call. Someone tweets a whistle and points the side of the road, and you’re done. There’s no question that I’ve been pulled. However, once you get clusters of racers, things get a little tricky, which is what happened at Ventura, and is what will be solved by The Smart Future.
In the Category 4 crit, Jamie was holding his own about two groups behind the race leader. He wasn’t in danger of being lapped, though his bunch was slowly passing other guys who had fallen behind. As he passed the refs, there was a whistle, but no clear indication of who should go, just a blanket “You’re all out.” Jamie kept going, only to get yanked a few laps later.
Now, I can appreciate how tough a judge’s job is. You’ve got all these guys zipping by, and you’ve got to make quick calls to people who a) may not hear you or b) may be too tired to attention to detailed instructions. Bike racing tries to be as budget conscious as possible, and it’s cheaper just to point at a bunch of guys and relegate them than it is to, say, give everyone a timing chip that talks to racers and lets them know, so sorry, but you’re done, either by a piped electronic voice or electric shock.
Or is it?
After reading this post about a 90% drop in the price of RFIDs, I have your Smart Future solution.
Every year, I renew my USCF racing license. When I get my card in the mail, it comes with a bunch of RFID tags that I can stick to my bottom bracket. Every time I go to a race, I sign in, get a race number, and roll my bike over the Magic Cheap-Ass Timing Mat, which reads my RFID tag and ties it to my race number. Now, when we race, one judge can watch the race number while another can watch the screen that’s showing RFID results as we roll over the finish line, which is made of incredibly thin and durable Smart Tape, which is just reading the RFIDs rolling overhead. The screen judge will have a simple display of who’s in the lead, who’s lagging, and who’s about to get lapped. When it comes time to relegate someone, the magical software will spit out a list with race number, rider name and rider team for the announcer to say, before the rider approaches the line so he can actually hear his instructions, “Rider number 445, Adam Rakunas, please pull to the side.” If I’m in a pack with other guys, and I’m the only one getting pulled, the other guys can continue while I drift to the side, filled with equal parts shame and rage, an emotion that I will now call shrage.
I know there are RFID timing systems already available, but these rely on chips you wear on your ankle. They are also pretty expensive to rent and have long setup times and all sorts of other things that won’t work for a cheap-ass cycling race. But if NEC is talking about being able to print ten thousand RFID tags for a hundred bucks, then bracket tags could become an easy option. Hell, a race promoter could hand out his own tags in the race number packet, cutting USCF out of the equation completely. If the reader technology drops in price, then, dude.
Right. Let’s get to it!
I am closing in on finishing this first draft of my first novel, and I am fucking terrified.
This is the biggest thing I’ve ever written, and the end is barreling down on me like a freight train packed with high explosives, saxophone-playing ninjas and intelligence-enhanced dinosaurs (none of which are in this novel, but, dude, wouldn’t that rock?). It’s going to be a bit of a relief to knock this whole thing out and let it mellow, and…oh my God, it’s going to suck.
I know that I’ll be ironing out all the creases and puttying over the cracks in the second (and third, and fourth, and on and on until the nth-until-accepted) draft, but this is still scary, man. I’ve been working on this thing since July of 2007, though, really, I haven’t put my ass in the chair with regularity until April (yay, underemployment!). It’s been good and hard and frustrating and fun getting these words out and driving this train to the end of the exploding, musical, dinosaur-laden line.
But what if what I’ve written sucks? What if I can’t save it? What if I’ve been wasting my time?
The only saving grace is that I’m pretty sure everyone who’s ever written anything has felt the same way. I can’t be the only one who looks at a draft and gets the pants scared off him. I know not to put the cart before the horse. I know, I know, I know.
That doesn’t make it any easier. Fortunately, that’s why God invented pie.
I want everyone to know: I love bees. Bees are our buddies. When the thyme in Anne’s and my backyard and the rosemary in our front yard are full of bees, I am ecstatic, because it means our plants are healthy and pollinated and thriving. Without bees, we would be doomed.
That said, if I ever meet the citrus farmers who decided that this weekend was the right time to hire some beekeepers to come and pollinate their crops, I’m gonna kick ‘em right in the oranges.
…begins after the cut.
Anne and I are adopting.
This, I’ve found, means meeting interesting people, attending classes, and filling out paperwork. Lots and lots of paperwork. So much that I’m going to go to every red state and pitch Rev. Rakunas’s Sure-Fired Pregnancy Prevention Method, which entails making kids fill out so many forms that they lose all interest in sex. Look for me on Dr. Phil later this year.
We’re going through an agency called Vista del Mar, and the experience has been very educational (have I mentioned the paperwork?). So far, we’ve got one class down, with three more to go (including water safety, which Anne and I find funny as hell seeing how we swim in the ocean for fun). Then a social worker comes to our place and studies us and our apartment (which we’ll likely have to cover in several layers of protective foam), and, if we’re deemed worthy, we wait until VdM matches us with a birth mother. It could take eighteen months. It could take a few days. We get to be expectant parents, though I get the feeling I won’t stop holding my breath until the whole thing is finalized.
(This is the point where my parents pipe up and say, “No, you won’t stop holding your breath *ever*, smart guy.”)
I will be writing a little bit about this, but it will mostly be from a nuts-and-bolts process point-of-view. Somewhere along the line, this will stop being our story and will become our kid’s, and it’s not my place to tell that story here. I trust that you’ll bear with me.
Right. That’s all from me for now. Back to the paperwork.
This is what I want:
I want every single parking sign in my neighborhood to have an RFID tag. I want them to ping my car during the hours there are parking restrictions. I want my car to ping me before the street sweepers arrive, so I can move my car and not give the City of Santa Monica my hard-earned money.
Keep your smartphone. I want smart parking.
