Oh thank god. I was planning on a 200km, 300km, and 400km this year, all as mental preparation, and then having to blitz next year by traveling to warmer locales. I
I'm doing my 200km at the end of April, and my 300km in early July, followed by a 400km gravel in early August. Going to be a grind.
Yeah, similar experience when I was in Berlin on vacation in 2023. Had a rail transfer to Amsterdam set for 16:30. Canceled without explanation or warning, and the replacement was:
Berlin -> Duisberg, with a 13-minute layover
Duisberg -> Viersen, with a 6-minute layover
Viersen -> Venlo, with a 7-minute layover
Venlo -> Eindhoven, with a 38-minute layover
Eindhoven -> Amsterdam
As you can probably guess, this is not at all what happened. Shit started to disintegrate around Viersen, we did some shuffling and waiting for later trains, and wound up in Aachen around midnight. The hotel across from the train station was closed for the night, we weren't going to stay in the nearby hostel after seeing one too many horror movies, and so we walked over a mile to a nearby hotel. Staff was lovely. We got in to a room by 01:00, showered, plugged in all our devices, and passed out around 02:00. Up at 05:00 and back to the train station to catch a ride to Rotterdam (very full train), and then on to Amsterdam. We hit our hotel about 12 hours behind schedule, changed clothes and got on with it.
Germany and France had the worst trains. Italy was insanely efficient/on-time.
Microcenter has a total of 29 stores across the US. Yankee Candle has almost 10x as many locations (240).
Yes, Microcenter "exists", but primarily through selective cultivation of their locations. From a pure market footprint perspective, they are outclassed by a candle company, and many other niche businesses.
At no point was I entirely denying that some people go to physical stores to buy components. I was just countering the idea that a majority of people do so, as opposed to ordering online.
Bicycles are an odd duck where this is concerned -- you go to a department store (no, actually don't) or a bike shop and buy a whole bike as a single assembly. But because there are standards, as others have pointed out re: computers, it's very feasible to just buy all the parts individually and piece together the bike that you want (which is what I do). Honestly, working in a hot (or cold, it is Minnesota, after all) garage, sometimes I question my sanity when I'm assembling these things...but the ability to fine-tune what you want and not be beholden to the standards of some marketing department or the cost-cutting assholes that run private equity funds is quite nice.
Ultimately, I'd love it if there were enough standards out there where I could spec out a car, and have it built up from parts...or just buy a stock one, if that's what I wanted. I feel that way about a lot of products that I interact with -- appliances usually have shitty UX, car software is usually garbage, and I'd love it if I didn't have to rely on DJI for a drone (good luck getting them in the U.S. anymore, anyway).
I think that with any product there's a subset of people who are like, "Eh, good enough," and willing to buy whatever the big manufacturers are pushing, but there's a smaller subset that wants to really dial-in something that fits their needs.
The "reading out loud" method is something I do, too -- learned it while getting my B.A. in Creative Writing -- it's great for helping you understand when a sentence is awkward or too wordy, or when the rhythm of a longer piece of writing is off. Writing is just speech with the benefit of an extra filter. Use the filter.
Thirty-two years ago, I got them tattooed onto my leg, the day after I arrived at Ft. Bragg, NC. It's faded and blurred out from the waxing and waning of muscle tone in my calf, and sunlight, and the occasional scrape from crashing the bike. But it's been part of me for so long, the only real option left is to get it lasered-down and redone.
Great show despite the suburban light pollution (20 miles south of Minneapolis). And we’re still not at the peak of the solar cycle until 2026.
This was what finally spurred me to learn the night mode settings on my iPhone camera. (Hint: use 10-second exposures.) Even got some half-decent results:
Good luck tomorrow!