You may have noticed that Deb Acord hasn’t been posting the last few weeks. She’s been going through a really hard time. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers. Go read her post on her blog and leave a comment.
– UltraRob
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You may have noticed that Deb Acord hasn’t been posting the last few weeks. She’s been going through a really hard time. Please keep her in your thoughts and prayers. Go read her post on her blog and leave a comment.
– UltraRob
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I’m planning to have some UltraRob.com t-shirts and cycling jerseys made. Some will go to lucky readers in contests. They’ll also be available for purchase.
I need to solve something first though. For a while I’ve been back and forth on whether to get a new logo. If I’m going to change the logo, I want to do it before having t-shirts and jerseys made.
You can help me out by answering the poll below. (If you aren’t reading this directly on the UltraRob blog, you’ll probably need to go there.)
Also I’d love to know your ideas on ways to improve the site. Please leave a comment below or you can shoot me an email at poll@ultrarob.com. Thanks!
– UltraRob
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Last Saturday we went up to the Cripple Creek Ice Festival. There were some amazing sculptures. There was an ice maze and sledding for the kids. Out kids really enjoyed it. It is still going on this weekend and would make a fun trip for locals. Check the website for details.
I took several photos of the ice carvings. I also did a page that shows the carving of a moose sculpture and then using fire to give it a frosted glass look.
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The last few weeks I’ve been working on a much needed new design for UltraRob.com. I’ve started on it a few times in the past but never had the time to get it done. I got laid off from my job a few weeks ago so I’ve had more time. It’s hard to believe though the time I’m spending looking for a new job in the current recession.
The design still isn’t anything fancy but I think it’s a big improvement from the old one. I’d love to hear what you like and what you don’t.
The only change here on UltraRob’s Adventures until last night was the header. I worked on the new design on the blog last night until I ran out of brain cycles. I still have a bit of tweaking to do on it.
I changed the home page, about page, most of the photo pages and some other pages over the last couple weeks. I still have the cycling and outdoor gear pages, a few older photo pages and some miscellaneous pages to change to the new design.
How are the changes looking so far?
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http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=1427682&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1
Balancing Point from DANNY BROWN on Vimeo.
This video has amazing rock stacking and balancing. I’m really not sure how it was created. I’m trying to just enjoy it and not spend too much time figuring it out.
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A couple months ago, I wrote that my brother-in-law was in the hospital with cancer. One of my long training rides for the Leadville 100 was to Denver to see him in the hospital. Unfortunately he never came home from the hospital. He passed away a little over a week ago.
This past week we had relatives staying with us. Not only was it tough with the funeral but other things kept going wrong. First the basement sink clogged. Next as we were leaving for the viewing, the panic alarm on the van went off and wouldn’t stop until I disconnected the battery.
Then we started having the sewer backing up. We were ready to leave for the grave side service when my 5 year old said it was backing up again. I ran down and started vacuuming it up with the shop vac. I took out 16 gallons of water and it was still coming. It turned out one of the toilets had stuck on.
Hopefully the coming week will be a little calmer. I will be adjusting to working from home full-time. The company I work for laid off some in our local office a few weeks ago. There are now only 6 of us left here and we will be telecommuting full time. There are certainly some positives to that but also some downsides.
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Dave Moulton tagged me (his blog has moved to new location)to write six little known random things about myself. He was tagged by Ron at Cozy Beehive which is another blog I read.
I’ve been tagged a couple times before. The other times I was tagged it was for 5 things. It seems the meme has been growing in the last year.
I started writing this nearly 2 weeks ago but just couldn’t find the inspiration to come up with little known things about me. I revealed enough last time. In the meantime the Fat Cyclist was tagged.
He thought it was unimaginative and came up with a list of questions to answer. I like his new meme better so I’m switching to it.
If you could have any one — and only one — bike in the world, what would it be?
I prefer not to have needless constraints. There are enough real ones without making more.
Do you already have that coveted dream bike? If so, is it everything you hoped it would be? If not, are you working toward getting it? If you’re not working toward getting it, why not?
For me it’s not about the dream bike. It’s about the dream rides.
If you had to choose one — and only one — bike route to do every day for the rest of your life, what would it be, and why?
See my answer to the first question.
What kind of sick person would force another person to ride one and only one bike ride to to do for the rest of her / his life?
Some poor, unhappy person that can’t stand to see other people happy. I don’t think Fatty is unhappy but he is the one that came up with question …
Do you ride both road and mountain bikes? If both, which do you prefer and why? If only one or the other, why are you so narrowminded?
I ride both. They’re different tools. If I’m going to ride 200 miles on the road, I prefer my road bike. If I’m wanting to go to the middle of nowhere on single track, I prefer my mountain bike.
Have you ever ridden a recumbent? If so, why? If not, describe the circumstances under which you would ride a recumbent.
No. I’d ride a recumbent if the closest food was 20 miles away and I didn’t have any other way to get there. I suppose I could run but I only do that if something large and scary is chasing me.
Have you ever raced a triathlon? If so, have you also ever tried strangling yourself with dental floss?
No, I swim just like a Rock. Straight to the bottom and that’s where I stay. If I raced a triathlon, there’d be no need for me to strangle myself.
Suppose you were forced to either give up ice cream or bicycles for the rest of your life. Which would you give up, and why?
That’s easy, ice cream. Ice cream is good but it’s not near the top of my favorite foods.
What is a question you think this questionnaire should have asked, but has not? Also, answer it.
Have you done a solo 24 hour race? If not, what are you waiting for? If yes, when are you doing your next one?
I’ve done 6 solo 24 hour mountain bike races and 4 races on the road that were longer. Hopefully I’ll do a long race next year.
You’re riding your bike in the wilderness (if you’re a roadie, you’re on a road, but otherwise the surroundings are quite wilderness-like) and you see a bear. The bear sees you. What do you do?
This has actually happened to me twice. Fortunately I’m scary enough looking that both times the bear ran away from me. I slammed the brakes and gave them time to get away. As fast as they ran, they didn’t need much time.
Since I already had my list of 6 bloggers chosen, I’m sticking with it instead of Fatty’s three. Even he couldn’t stop at three.
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In my journeys around the web, I found a blog by Patrick Curl called There’s a Blog in my Soup. The interesting thing about Patrick is he plans to go on a road trip this summer and interview a blogger from all 50 states and do it in 50 days. Patrick has created an American Blogger Directory that he is going to use to pick which bloggers he visits.
It would actually be more interesting if he was going to do it by bike. Alaska would be a long ride and Hawaii would be a bit of a problem. Maybe I should do it next summer. It would probably be hard though to do it in 50 days by bike.
To get more visits to his site and raise awareness of his road trip, Patrick is doing a group blogging experiment. He asked people to submit what they thought were their best post and then he picked his favorites. My post 7 Mountain Biking Confidence Killers was one of the ones selected.
Here are the other posts to see what’s going on outside of cycling
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This post is to test switching the blog feed to full posts from partial posts. I don’t like partial posts in feeds anymore than any one else. The reason I had stayed with partial posts was the way I’ve done something caused problems in full posts. I’ve wanted to fix it for a long time but it never made it to the top of the list. Lately it’s been bugging me too much and so I spent the few hours to fix it. Of course that’s if I don’t find out there’s a problem once I post this.
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Due to not getting something configured correctly when I changed servers over the weekend, the feeds for this blog and my deals blog weren’t being updated. I believe the problem is now fixed.
Is anything else broken?
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