Biking and More

I watched a clip on YouTube today where someone talked about racing in the Brompton race on Zwift and being absolutely knackered. I sympathized. I entered that race and placed something like 33 out of 34. Ah, per Zwiftpower I was 23 out of 24, but I was D category and there were a lot of E cat racers that did better than me. Mostly, that tells me Zwift’s race cats are sus. The absolutely lowest end of the D cat in general is about 2.2 watts/kg. The upper end of E is 2.2 but there are a few in the 2.8 range. 2.2 is about my max at my weight for an hour, and I REALLY have to push it to maintain that output. End of last season, after six months of hard riding November through early April, I was at about 2.4-2.7 when I was at peak. I suspect it thinks I’m still pulling that level. Probably should be – but this was the first year where I transitioned from Zwift and hills to outside and not monitoring power/effort over the sprint/summer/fall. Lessons learned. Anyway...I tanked at the Brompton ride, although it was nice to pick up the (virtual) bike as the third bike to level up a frame on.

Am I talking about politics or work reorgs yet? No. I’m not talking about board games either, although maybe next time. I have three new board games and I’ve only played one of them so far. I’m excited about the bicycling game that came with huge race track mats as part of the Kickstarter. I’ll have compare that to Flamme Rouge next time. Might be worth queuing up for Con of the North.
Wait...maybe I will mention something about the reorg. I shifted from cloud to desktop after 12 years in the cloud space (best guess). Since my days working on WestKM and the TR desktop tools. This is Thanksgiving week and for the past decade when it was a holiday week I’d spend the time cleaning up the backlog, getting it hammered back into shape, reviewing things that were out of date...all while tracking the pager and release myself so my whole team could just go enjoy their holiday. Well…that’s not a thing when you’re only releasing twice a year. There is no immediate fix, outside a patch that takes a concerted effort from several teams. I don’t think there’s even a pager, because there’s no need to start before the next reasonable workday because you’ll need to coordinate the patch, the installers, the signoff, and more and it still is on a fairly stable schedule instead of weekly (or in the case of my last company, multiple times a day). It’s a significant change in responsibility.

My kid finally finished up the last Dungeon Crawler Carl book, so I need to quick finish Enshittification and Medieval Nuns at War (nonfiction, in case you think I’m reading some sort of smut) and move on. I’d claim I wasn’t reading much lately because I’d been waiting on that to be available, but it’s definitely the reorg at fault.

Ah...I played a LOT of Monsters are Coming: Rock and Road! this weekend. Too much. I recommend it as a diversion if you can justify the missing gap in your weekend/evenings. It’s tower defense with a moving city, resource collection, and a hero independent of the city who can level up weapons separate from the city adding weapons and resource bumps and leveling them up. Hard mode is HARD (and not even the hardest), but like Hades/II there’s a progression of skills, so you can keep playing and losing until your hero and city get stronger and collect faster/more. I like the roughly 30 minute time per run/round. Keeps it bound and any multiple runs you have to acknowledge as your own inability to say “maybe not one more right now”.