1400 km

Hit the 1400 km mark this afternoon.  Did a ride out 22x to 22 south and back.  Hit 1400 km at Spruce Meadows on the way back.  Just under 60 km to go for 600 km in July and two days, should be fine.

- Peace

Who Are the Sinners Again?

Heard something new in Mark the other day and was surprised I hadn't heard it before.  Mark 14 is a dark passage, betrayal, denial and friends who can't do the simple things like stay awake.

In the middle of this Jesus says “Are you still sleeping and resting? Enough! The hour has come. Look, the Son of Man is delivered into the hands of sinners.   Rise! Let us go! Here comes my betrayer!”

What caught my attention was the term sinners.  While most people know it as religious term,  used to insult people, it's not a term Jesus uses in that way most of the time.  In Mark the word only appears Mark 14 and Mark 2.


Here's how the term Sinners is used in Mark 2

Once again Jesus went out beside the lake. A large crowd came to him, and he began to teach them.  As he walked along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax collector’s booth. “Follow me,” Jesus told him, and Levi got up and followed him.

While Jesus was having dinner at Levi’s house, many tax collectors and sinners were eating with him and his disciples, for there were many who followed him. ¹⁶ When the teachers of the law who were Pharisees saw him eating with the sinners and tax collectors, they asked his disciples: “Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?”

 On hearing this, Jesus said to them, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”

In Mark 2, the "teachers of the law" are up set that Jesus is eating with sinners, tax collectors being the worst kind of sinners for cooperating with Rome.  In Mark 14 it the "chief priests" who are coming to arrest Jesus.  The Gospel is often an inversion, the least being divine, the last being first.  In Mark 14 it's the religious leaders who protested Jesus eating with the wrong type of people, conspiring to commit murder. 

- Peace

OpenID for Comments

[If you're reading this on Facebook, don't worry this is for people who comment directly on the blog.]

I've had to turn off Anonymous commenting as the sheer volume of spam has trained gmail that all comment notifications from the blog are spam and then I miss real comments.  99% of the spam is from anonymous users so I've restricted comments to users who are signed in and we'll see how that goes.

If you have a google account or any other valid OpenID account you can comment.  You may not know you have an OpenID, but you probably do.  See: Surprise! You may already have an OpenID.

- Peace

Lines of Power @ 1300 km

It's been two days since my last 100 km mark.  Not sure how long I can maintain the 100 km every 2 to 3 days rate.  Vacation will mess with that, even with the biking I have planned.   Will see how it goes.  Still a couple of days behind where I should be to hit 600 km in July, but that's better than where I was a couple of days ago.

- Peace

1200 KM

It's been over a week since I last hit a 100 km mark.  Didn't sleep well early in the week and it messed me up the rest of the week.  On the upside I did ride 71 km today.  Still I'm 4 days off the pace to hit 600 km in July, with just over a week to go.  Going to be tight.

- Peace

For now: G+ = FB - Farmville

I love how xkcd caputred Google+: Facebook that's not Facebook.  You could also say that G+ = FB - Farmville.  In fact G+ is a very stripped down social networking site, there's just not much there in terms of features, and I'm thinking that's by design. At least for now.

Mark Hurst points out that most Facebook "users are more concerned with the inbound than the outbound.
... The pain point for average users is the overload of incoming information". Mark doesn't think that the G+ stream does anything to improve the reading experience. But if your stream isn't clogged with a bunch of auto generated content from games, quizzes, check ins, etc then the signal to noise ration should be better right? And Mark seems to miss that you can quickly filer your stream by circle.

The stripped down nature of G+ has to be by choice. It's not like Google can't do features. Google has done the massive integration approach to social networking. When Buzz launched it was all about all the different places that you could automatically pull information from.  Almost everyone set it pull in their twitter feed, then they complained about how slow it was in posting twitter feeds and they left.  While I use and enjoy Buzz, 95% of what's there is people's twitter posts.  Also Buzz's flickr integration seems to be broken right now, so integration with a ton of third party sites is a pain to maintain.

I'm not sure how long G+ will remain the bare bones social networking site that it is today, after all FB started out as a cleaner, simpler MySpace and look where it is now.

I'd like to see better integration with other Google products like Reader. Sparks are cool but I'd like them in Reader and I'd like to share with my circles from Reader. I'd also like to be able to schedule an event from Google Calender with a circle and have people discuss it as a G+ item. And why is Huddles a separate chat program from Google Talk? Let me do a group chat with a circle in Google talk weather we're on smart phones or computers.

And yeah I'd like to auto import my blog and my flickr stream. I don't know if Google will do any of what I want.

I can do without Farmville updates, but then Google is a $100 million investor in Zynga, makers of Farmville.  So enjoy G+ = FB - Farmville while it lasts.

- Peace

Olivia: What the?

Melissa & Phil's daughter Olivia turned one earlier this month.  They put on a great party! (Thanks for having us Melissa!)  When I asked what I could bring the only thing Melissa mentioned was the camera :) 

While there are many cute pictures of Olivia, I really love the expression on her face in this one, reminds me of Phil.

- Peace

1100 KM

Hit the 1100 KM mark this morning as I climbed up out of the river valley towards work in the NE.   While I'd hoped to be at the 1200 mark today, I'm just a day behind hitting 600 KM for July.  Not bad.

- Peace

Vacation 2011

We have our vacation plans for 2011 mostly figured out:
- Revelstoke for 2 days of biking.
- Kellowna for a winery tour.
- Vancouver just for a night.
- I'm going to ride the Sunshine Coast from Gibsons to Lund.  Got the idea from Cycle the Sunshine Coast.  Had been thinking about riding the Kettle Valley, but Kim pointed out it can get to +40 there in the summer.
- Then we're going to spend a week on Savary Island at the Savary Island Resort.

Looking forward to it :)

- Peace

1000 KM

Hit the 1000 KM mark on Wed while crossing Fishcreek.

900 KM and a Plan

Richard couldn't make yesterdays ride, so he suggested we do the Glenmore Reservoir, Clement came along too. We stopped for lunch at Nellie's on 90th, I think this may be a new tradition, ride and eat! As we were getting ready to split up, I was at 899 KM so the guys rode an extra KM with me to be in the 900 KM shot, thanks guys!

I didn't get the 200 KM I was hoping for in the last week of June, didn't even make 100 KM, stuff happens. So this is the latest that I've hit 900 KM since I've started photo blogging my KM.

On the up side I did over 500 KM in June. The plan is to do 600 KM in July, August and Sept. That would put me at 2700 KM by the end of Sept, just a head of where I was last year when the rear hub went. If I can do 500 KM in Oct and 400 in Nov that would put me at 3600 KM for the year, 1000 KM more than last year. Any ridding in Dec would be bonus.

- Peace

Jumping Pound Loop eh!

For Canada day I rode Jumping Pound Loop in the NE of Kananaskis country with Andy, Clement and Ken. 10 KM of single track in the forest of the foothills, paradise! Parts of the trail we're muddy enough to force us off our bikes, but other than that the trail was in great shape. Great weather, just cool enough for comfortable riding with the trees keeping us out of the wind and providing shade. You can find this trail by taking highway 68 south and west from the Transcanada. The trail head is just after the pavement ends. Or you could just checkout the trail data from mytracks that I posted to google maps.

- Peace