Troy Sandal

I’ve finally got my pics from Sven and Destiny’s wedding Sayulita Mexico posted! Check them out!

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After many months of procrastination I’ve finally uploaded a ton of photos to my Flickr sets. You’ll find my photos from Burning Man 2007, our 4th of July road trip, our honeymoon in New Zealand and even John’s 40th Birthday photos. I promise I’ll be better in the future

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After a one year break I decided to return to the Cascade Cycling Seattle to Portland bike ride this year.  I rode with my trusted partner Richy Costleigh and the ox known as Allan Padgett.  By far it was my best STP yet, both in speed and stamina.  Our statistics for the ride were:

Avg Speed : 19.6
Distance : 206 miles
Ride Time : 10:30
Total Time : 13:15
Vertical : 5000′
Calories : 8153
Yes, I burned 8,153 calories on the ride this year.  I’m still hungry.

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I’m in Las Vegas for the Microsoft MIX07 conference. I’m too busy with sessions and trying out the platform to say much just yet but this is a very exciting technology release for Microsoft. What I’m seeing is much more than just an attempt at a Flash killer. What I’m seeing is perhaps a wonderful new way to build rich, interactive applications that can be consumed in a browser, any browser.

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My photography group f1 recently held it’s quarterly show. Our topic was ‘urban life’ yet I misread it to be ‘urban living’. Instead of fauna I shot concrete and trains. Please take a look at my ‘urban living’ photos and let me know what you think.

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Two weeks ago I had the privilege of attending the wedding of Bradley McDevitt and Felicity Mansanarez in wonderful New Orleans. They picked April 1st as the day the blend themselves in the Cuisinart of love. My duties were to video tape the ceremony, snap lots of photos and, at the last moment, tend to the bar. There’s nothing I love more than to tend a bar, even if I don’t really know how to mix drinks.

My photos are posted at Flickr.

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Over the past 4 months I’ve given the working at home environment a decent try out only to find that I’m going nuts by myself all day. It’s not bad for short stings but for long periods, say 4 months, it leaves something to be desired. Instead of hanging out with the cat all day I’ll instead be sitting at a desk upstairs at Adaptive Path in the South Park neighborhood. To say I’m excited doesn’t quite cover it. Today I have not only the opportunity to start meeting people in the tech community but also to have new places to eat! Did I mention I like eating?
Being alone was at first liberating in that I had no interruptions but over time it became a burden. Not having someone to interrupt means you just might work too long and your wrists will start killing. Then there’s the whole issue of transitioning your day job from a very interactive office in Seattle to a remote workspace. You have to change the kind of work you do assuming you were dependent on those office interactions. Think about how contractors work – big chunks of well defined work that have only moderate requirements for people interaction. With my new space and a new focus on how I work I think this is going to make for a very positive change.

Plus new places to eat!

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I spent almost 3 hours over the last few days attempting to resurrect my old blog with no success. It turns out that during the PowWeb migration last July all my MovableType BerkeleyDB files became corrupt. I cannot resurrect them on either a Windows of OS X machine using the latest version of BerkeleyDB. Thus I will move forward with my new blog. Not all is lost, I have archives of my old blog, but reproducing each one by hand in WordPress will take time. 4 years worth of blogs is worth it I imagine.

In the next week I will replace my now stale blog with this new shiny WordPress blog. Wish me luck!

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Yep, I seem to have lost my old blog in the transition to PowWeb’s new server infrastructure. I’m no cgi-bin expert and to be honest I didn’t really care to ressurct the old entries. Think of it as starting a new diary or losing all your cassettes or LPs. You get to start anew! So let it begin. Once I’ve got this new Wordpress install formatted to match the web site I’ll start posting again. Post I will for I’ve got an entire new city to start talking about. San Francisco!

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This isn’t going to be a long, detailed account of my STP experience, it’s going to be a small, succinct ode to a fabulous ride. For the second year in a row I rode the STP in one day, Seattle to Portland, 204 miles @ 18.4 mph for an on bike time of 11:04, total time of 14:30 (we took lots of rests). That beats last year’s time by 00:30, a large accomplishment. However, that extra 5% of time savings took at least an extra 15% of effort. How the faster riders do it I don’t know, but I respect them even more after trying to shave off an hour from my time.

My STP was made 1000% better this year by putting together a team. Richie and Rene were my co-pilots from the start with Rob being a last minute addition to the team. Without them the STP just wouldn’t have been worth doing. I’ve never been much for team sports, but this was the team that changed my mind. I love you guys man! Next year let’s train harder, go faster, and to the DeathRide instead.

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