This past weekend we were in Solvang, riding in the Solvang Prelude. It’s a fun ride, that offers a 25-mile, a 50-mile, and a 63-mile option. We opted for the 25-mile option as out tender bums were not up to the longer 50-mile haul. The 25 miles went well: we averaged a brisk 14 MPH clip, and felt pretty strong at the end. We spent the afternoon doing a bit of wine tasting in town, then went to dinner at a very neat place in Santa Ynez called the Vineyard House. Sunday we got up early and went for an 8-mile run, as we continued our enhanced training program. Running in the Santa Ynez Valley is so pleasant, with gently rolling hills and miles and miles of bike trails. We went to Los Olivos Cafe for lunch, then went to one of our favorite wineries, Babcock, before heading for home. All in all, a wonderful and relaxing two days.
UPDATE: Pics here. I only had the iPhone with me for the ride (oops!) but I’m surprised at the quality, especially outdoors.
Monday was a big day for me: my new baby arrived! I finally faced the fact that my old and faithful G5, which had taken to eating everything attached to it (final toll: two iPhones, two hard drives, one CD/DVD drive), needed to be replaced. So I ordered a brand spanking new Mac Pro. It arrived late Friday, actually, but we had already left for Solvang so I had to contain my excitement until Monday morning. Boy, is it fast! I ordered extra RAM for it, and upgraded the graphics card (it now has 4GB of Ram and an ATI Radeon graphics card), and it also has two 16x DVDRW drives. I took the hard drives out of the G5 and put them in the Mac Pro, so it has two 55 GB drives, one 750 GB drive, and a 250 GB drive in the fourth slot. I am officially in geek heaven. I named the computer Mickey (for the 80’s song Mickey – “Oh Mickey, you’re so fine, you’re so fine you blow my mind”).
I also have two new monitors to go with Mickey. Okay, that was overkill, but my older Apple display’s colors weren’t as bright as they once were, and I have been feeling for a while that Apple displays are overpriced. There was absolutely nothing wrong with my second monitor aside from the fact that it wasn’t widescreen. And huge. So I got two 24″ HP w2408 widescreen LCD monitors for $550 each. I am surrounded now by glorious colors.
I spent all day yesterday setting all of this new equipment up moving data over from the old machine (for some reason I wasted two and a half hours doing a firewire transfer before tripping on the firewire cable and aborting the entire transfer – grrrr – before I clued in to the fact that I could do it all a LOT faster if I just stuck the old computer’s SATA drive into the new computer) and installing fresh versions of software. There are few things in life more fun than getting a new computer up and running.
Life is good!