My route first took me west over Bingham Hill then I headed south towards the dams. A short jaunt found me at the bottom of the toughest climb of the day. It’s not terribly long, but it’s steep. I dropped to my lowest gear to grind up the hill at 5-6 mph (sometimes sub-5). From there it was a combination of quick descents and short, mild climbs (blips, really).

It looks much less intimidating from this angle.

The views along the ridge are quite spectacular. To the east, the landscape quickly drops into Fort Collins sprawl while the Reservoir and mountains sit to the west. With the temperature around 75, I slowed down to take in the scenery and watch others out to enjoy the day.

I soon found myself at the bottom of the second big climb (Centennial climb, I believe the cool kids call it). Looking at the steep road ahead, I had bailed out here the day before. This day, I gear down, preparing myself to settle in and grind away. I soon found, though, my perception of the hill was worse than the reality. In fact, I was able to gear up and quickly ascend up the climb. Another ridge and a descent and I was at the road heading back to Fort Collins. There, 20 yards from the T in the road, my back tire flatted.

Roadie, temporarily out of commission.

I have to say, though, that there are much worse places to flat than on a ridge overlooking glittering water with a mountainous background.

The last leg, though short, seemed to take as long as the previous 2+ miles. I lost the trail for a few minutes before spotting the helpful cairns that would guide me as I scrambled around and over rocks to the top. The requisite “me at the summit” shot.

And, The Sister ™ didn’t lie — the views are pretty good.

I hung out at the top for a few minutes, but the wind was making exposure on high rocks uncomfortable, and I really didn’t want to ruin the day by having to put on a jacket, so I followed another group out and headed down. I quickly lost them and made good time down the mountain passing several groups of climbers making their descent as well. My knees did not take well to scrambling back down the rocks, but overall the hike was fairly easy.

And, if you have a keen eye, you might have noticed the storm coming in at my back in the summit shot. Yes, today was 35 degrees, windy, rainy, and snowy.

We added to the ride every week, getting nearer to the summit every time and set out a couple Sundays ago to do the full ride. Though fall is closing in, we managed to pick a day with a perfect mix of sun and warmth. It was tough, but I made it to the top. We all did. Here’s the happy trio commemorating the event.

I’m not going to lie — I really felt I wimped out on the last big climb when I stopped for about 30 seconds to rest my burning quads. Mad at myself, I attacked Rist on a solo ride last Sunday. I felt great, no stopping, using only two chainrings for most of the ride. Seriously, I killed it. Now I can officially call “Rist season” complete.

My mid-80s model Bianchi hybrid is awesome in many ways, but I’m ready to climb hills with a lighter and faster bike. The Bianchi will now get tricked out with some rear baskets or panniers for carrying groceries or my chair for the New Belgium outdoor movies.

I think the maiden voyage on the Lemond will be tomorrow. If I don’t kill myself with the clipless pedals first.

Rather more relevant to most of you is the news that I’m going to stop posting to this site. I just don’t find the time to write for it anymore, and it’s rude to keep making people check for updates which never appear.

That was Dunstan signing off his blog (my favorite) at 1976design. Man, I miss that blog. Seriously, Dunstan, bring it back. Please.

As he says, it really is rude to stop posting indefinitely while people wait (or don’t) for updates. Guilty. And I feel bad. But the longer I went without posting, the less I missed it. Sure I missed the political and sports discussions my faithful readers are ever so willing to engage in, but that wasn’t impetus enough to get me to carve out time to spend in my WordPress backend.

My blog archives have always been a sort of chronicle of my life, and now I have a year+ long lapse — which is weird. So, the short version: work, family, volleyball, travelling, changing jobs, skiing, friends, biking, and loving life in Colorado.

But don’t get me wrong, despite the crappiness of the issues, it was still very important to vote. You will have an extremely difficult time convincing me otherwise. It was important to vote no to discrimination in the Colorado state constitution, to do my part to unseat a House Representative focused nearly entirely on writing discrimination into the US Constitution and being a mindless drone for President Bush, and to show my support for a referendum that would provide basic legal rights to domestic partnerships.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t help but wonder why the citizens of Colorado were having to vote on the retention of appeals court judges given that a special panel had already recommended their retention and given that likely no more than 1.7% of the voters even knew who the judges were or the decisions they had handed down. I was also curious why one would vote to change the state constitution to make it easier for issues to appear before voters. It already seems easy enough. People, I have a full time job — I don’t have the time to review all these issues. This is why we have a representative democracy. It isn’t awesome all the time, but when it works, it’s a great system.

As I did in the 2004 election, I will highlight the votes I cast that I feel were the most important.

• I voted FOR Angie Paccione (D) for House Reprentative in Colorado District 4.
• I voted NO to writing discrimination into the Colorado state constitution (Amendment 43)
• I voted YES to Referendum I which would allow domestic partnerships basic legal rights

Problem is: The pieces either stay in my head (and eventually slip away), or I attempt to write them down and the result is 1/100 of the quality of the original mental composition.

Addendum: Or they can’t stay composed long enough to finish a damn post (post originally started about three weeks ago). Or work is temporarily draining time reservoirs.

Let’s start with the wealthy. We can include big business in this examination as well since it generates a fair bit of our nation’s wealth and wealthy. Granted there are some in the upper income strata who reside there merely because of family wealth, but a majority of our nation’s most wealthy are first generation success stories. As the book The Millionaire Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of America’s Wealthy notes, fewer than 20 percent of America’s millionaires inherited 10 percent or more of their wealth, nearly half never received any college tuition from their parents or other relatives, and more than half never received as much as $1 in inheritance.

But, they’re still hated. Chad Lapa agrees,

For some unknown reason we are taught either as kids, or though the left wing media, that people wealthy and successful are born with some special gene that products their success. Due to this unfair power they possess over us, they should be punished and forced to pay crazy high tax rates so their wealth can be re-distributed to the “less fortunate”. [sic]

While I wouldn’t say that people are taught by “the left wing media,” I do agree that “progressive” taxes are the average person’s way of redistributing wealth and, in effect, “punishing” the wealthy. However, the negative repercussions of redistributing wealth are staggering. Frankly, wealth creation is not a zero sum game. Just because one person has it, doesn’t mean another won’t or that it was hostilely taken from another party.

Similarly, big business is often decried as evil. I don’t deny that there is corruption in some companies (see: short term vs. long term). However, they also contribute a majority of our nations productivity gains (read: more wealth) and generate much of our nation’s wealth. By nature, they are more efficient (generally speaking and when they aren’t regulated into inefficiency) and employ a large percentage of the US workforce. Don’t read this to mean I don’t like small/medium businesses or that I believe bigger is better in the business world. My point is that large corporations aren’t inherently evil. Plus, they produce people like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett who then donate nearly $100 billion back to the world.

But, let’s think smaller. How many smart kids (”overachievers”) are teased and bullied everyday in school? Why do we have terms like nerd, geek, and dweeb? In my experience, people have been bold enough to tell me to my face that they hope I fail. Or, in the web development world, what about the successful 37signals (software company)? Many people laud them, but with each new, successful offering more and more contempt is directed towards them (for more on this: read their blog about any given day).

So, everyone, when did we start to hate success? Is it human nature?

The homosexual marriage lobby, as well as the polygamist lobby, shares the goal of essentially breaking down all State-regulated marriage requirements to just one: consent. In doing so, they are paving the way for legal protection of such repugnant practices as: homosexual marriage, unrestricted sexual conduct between adults and children, group marriage, incest, and bestiality. Using this philosophy, activist lawyers and judges are working quickly, State-by-State, through the courts to force same-sex marriage and other practices, such as polygamy, on our country.[…]

We need an amendment that restores and protects our societal definition of marriage, [and] blocks judges from changing that definition.

Senator Inhofe (R-OK)

I have a difficult time putting into words my aversion to the currently popular “we must stop activist judges” adage of which politicians are so very fond. The judicial process is not about what the majority of society (majority in society is in itself at best difficult to determine) feels should happen. God save us if it ever is. Perhaps a lesson in separation of power and the purpose of each branch of government is in order for Senator Inhofe.

I will go to several other countries that have redefined marriage, defined marriage out of existence. In the Netherlands, since proposals for same-sex marriage began to be debated, the out-of-wedlock birthrate has soared. It was a fairly stable country in out-of-wedlock births and was at low rate. […]

What happened to out-of-wedlock birthrates? You can see the situation in the Netherlands, which is particularly important because it was one of the lowest out-of-wedlock birthrate countries in Europe for a number of years, shows that until 1980, below 5 percent of the population was born out of wedlock. When we get the court cases which we have in the United States today saying marriage should be redefined, we see the impact, as well as a Supreme Court case that rules against marriage being the union of a man and a woman. Then we get symbolic marriage registration, registered partnership, same-sex unions, and now we are up to 35 percent as seen in this skyrocketing chart.

Sen. Brownback (R-OK)

If I’m understanding Senator Brownback correctly, he’s attempting to correlate registered partnerships and same-sex unions with the increase of out of wedlock births. Is he kidding? I’m not a senator with a full staff and do not hold an advanced research degree, but even I can see that these are junk “facts” being drawn from non-correlating data. This information, regardless of politics, should be thrown out for its inaccuracy.

I, for one, believe that the institution of marriage and the principles of democracy are too precious to surrender to the whims of a handful of unelected, activist judges. The will of the people should prevail. […]

Sen. Allard (R-CO)

Can’t. Type. Laughing. Too. Hard.

Before I quit of exhaustion from reading the same tired arguments repeatedly and running the same circle of reasoning over (and over and over), I will conclude this piece.

Editor’s note: It is extremely hard to find consistent permanent URLs within the Congressional Record. I’ve tried to add accurate links where possible, but it’s just not possible in all instances.

I’m currently in the process of evaluating open source ASP.NET content management systems. Important to me, of course, are adherence to web standards (coding and accessibility standards), cross-browser compatibility, simplicity/ease of use, etc. While, I was trying DotNetNuke (DNN) I became increasingly concerned about adherence to standards and cross-browser compatibility (among other things). I went searching on the forums for more information. I came upon a thread devoted to the topic of standards compliance in which a user inquires as to the timeline for web standards compliance in DNN. The replies were mixed. Some from users linking to tutorials on jumping through the hoops (sadly) necessary to make DNN produce valid XHTML code. Others, even more concerning, came from DNN team members. A few examples.

I will tell you that in all the work I get asked about, no one asks about CSS and XHTML compliancy, unless it’s a designer who went to do a multimedia course and was forced to some XHTML compliant site.

I’ve posted in forums before about my view on all this - and while I am no means an expert in every field, I’m looking at DNN right down the line from installing, hosting, advising, assisting, learning, you name it, and I think you need to also get this into perspective as well.

A final note, I am not saying it is not important to be XHTML compliant. I believe people should be able to use tabless or tabled designs, I personally have no preference for one or the other and have worked with both. I do think in terms of priorities, this is something I would consider to be lower on my list of must haves for the DotNetNuke framework.

However, IMHO the issue of accessibility compliance is much more important than xhtml compliance.

The above quotes, to me, show a serious misconception of web standards and the point of web standards — not to mention near contempt for standards compliance. To be fair, the users in the forum thread had themselves boiled standards down to code validation or css-based design versus table design. To me, web standards is about the entire approach to the architecture and design of a webpage/website. It’s not simply about creating XHTML that validates. It’s a way of thinking. Well-structured semantic code thoughtfully organized and designed leaves a smaller bandwidth fingerprint, loads faster for people on slower connections, and goes most of the way in making a website more accessible. A website that follows web standards is easier to maintain, and we all know maintenance is the real kicker in website development. I also think DNN missing the boat on web standards will cause them to lose the standards community (which isn’t small). As a standards-minded web developer, will I run the DNN obstacle course necessary to make a DNN website standards compliant (and for each upgrade after that)? Or would I turn to a product like Cuyahoga where the team is concerned with standards compliance and making it easy for developers to maintain website sanity?

Ultimately, this must be our own failure. How can the web standards message be improved? How can we fix the misconceptions that have propagated as a result of our own zealousness?