Things to Do When Moving to a New Town

So, we are right at the 6 month mark...still new to town but definitely finding our way around.  Here's a list of some of my accomplishments since moving to Fort Collins, along with a few things still to be done.

Get a Speeding Ticket

I actually accomplished this one before I was an official Colorado resident.  It turns out Fort Collins has traffic cameras in a few select neighborhoods.  I was looking at rental places back in December and I managed to blast through a 25 MPH section in my rental Prius...yes...a Prius.

Get Your Picture in the Newspaper

I am not sure that I've ever had my likeness in a VA paper but it didn't take long to get my face in a Fort Collins periodical.  Some CSU student was putting together an article for their paper and snapped some pictures of the local polo group.

Join Some Clubs

I have found myself leading the charge for Fort Collins Bike Polo (the hardcourt flavor anyway) and we are also tied in to the Overland Mountain Bike Club.  I am trying to keep my participation at a reasonable level so I don't find myself over extended like I was in C-Ville.  We'll see how that goes.

Find a Place to Hang

Over the years I had a few places I could hang out if I was just looking to kill some time.  In the early years it was Charlottesville Aquarium...then that shifted to C-ville Bike and Tri and Rudy's Paintball.  Unfortunately, Rudy's closed its doors but the bike shop was always a good time-killing spot.  I have yet to find a nice local place where I can just hang out and shoot the breeze without being a lingering weirdo.

Find a favorite ride

This one is tough.  We went back to VA recently and got a chance to ride some local trails.  It's so very nice to know every root, rock, corner, ledge, switchback and you just take it for granted.  I am contemplating picking a trail and just riding that for two weeks...just so I have something familiar to look forward to.

Project update

Things are going well with the two recently announced projects.  I made a slight shift to a different pushup paradigm because I just got a new droid phone and I found a free app (vs 2.99 for the legit hundredpushups.com app).  Anyway, that's been going for about two weeks so far...not really much else to report there.

The polo scoreboard is also going well.  I've got a lot of the basic logic worked out but I need to do a little work on the sound.  This kind of stuff is always a struggle...two steps forward, one step back kind of thing.
Here's a short video of what it does so far.  Once I've get the prototype all sorted out I can really start to think about how I want to build the final setup.

Two New Projects

I hesitate to announce new projects because...well...sometimes they just don't get finished.  I feel pretty good about these two (admittedly, I usually "feel pretty good" about every project) so I am going to go ahead and put them on the table.

They are pretty abstract right now, so this will be short.

The first, is a high tech bike polo scoreboard.  You would think that it would be pretty easy for 6 players to keep track of a game that only goes to 5 points.  But, put a few all out sprints in there, a couple of PBR's and after several games...scorekeeping is hopeless.  I am planning on driving the score keeper with a popular hobby microcontroller (Arduino) and putting the whole setup (countdown timer and scores) in some sort of enclosure.  I've got a lot of the code written and an Arduino Nano sitting on my desk but I am still waiting for some components to get across the country before I can really start building and testing the prototype.

The second is pretty straightforward...I started it once before but only made it about half way through.

One Hundred Pushups

I'll do the test today and start on the actual routines Monday.

Just did the test and pounded out 24 good pushups...which lets me skip ahead to week 3 according to the website.  YES!