We took a drive away from tourist areas of Nouméa, deep into the unpopulated interior. Having looked at the map of the area, I'd been thinking to rent a bicycle and ride there, but I wasn't able to find one to rent. Instead, we all took a drive there today, and I'm glad I didn't try to ride there unprepared. We went hours and hours without the slightest sign of civilization other than the road. No stores, no gas stations, no houses, no farms, no commerce or human presence of any kind except the occasional Provincial nature area (devoid of [...]

Sadly, we're at the Hilton on the mainland, with the worst in-room WiFi I've seen since.... well, since I last stayed at a major American hotel chain.

Just a quick writeup with some pictures of a nice group ride that I did two weeks ago with some of the stronger riders from Cycling Kyoto!. I was by far the newest, weakest, slowest, least experienced among them, but they're a nice fun group so they made me feel welcome.

今回の写真は二週間前のサイクリングの事です。

It was wet from a recent rain, so quite slippery. Discretion is the better part of valor, so Tomas aborted the attempt. I didn't even try. But as Rick H had suggested, I did measure the slope with the Compass Tool in my iPhone:

UPDATE: I originally wrote [...]

I've discovered an issue with how an iPhone give location information to apps, an issue that can have a dramatic impact on the accuracy of location data. The impact is either really good or really bad, depending on what the app (and you) want to use the location information for.

The issue is that the iPhone can get into a mode where instead of providing apps with your location directly from its normal location-tracking methods (GPS/GLONASS, WiFi and cell-tower signal strength), it "snaps" the location to the center of the nearest road it knows about. I call this "snap to [...]

As I mentioned in "Confused Kyoto Cherry Trees Bloom Five Months Early", Paul Barr and I rode our bikes down to Osaka from Kyoto. It's about 50km each way, so the round trip was about 100km (62mi) total.

Here's our trip on my cycling heatmap.

I'd made the same trip by myself earlier in the week, and written how windy it was for much of the day, but the wind during the trip down with Paul was by far the strongest sustained winds I'd ever ridden a bicycle in, on par with a medium-sized typhoon. It was just ridiculous. [...]