I'm currently at airport hotel in Osaka (which I've recommended before) so I can make an early flight out in the morning, for an unfortunately-sudden family-emergency trip to America. Having arrived here with plenty of time, I'll go ahead follow up on this weekend's “Watching My First Cyclocross Bike Race”.

Today's pictures concentrate on the Mud Bath during the practice before the races.

A common pattern was for the rider to enter fast and powerful, with the apparent intention to just brute force his way through the mud. This would have been fine except that the mud was sufficiently deep to grab the front wheel, flipping the bike up enough so that the back wheel no longer had traction. Forward momentum immediately stopped, and the rider who couldn't unclip in time found himself lying in the mud.

The rider above puts his weight as far back as possible, putting some weight behind the bike so that it helps shove the bike through the mud, and also more weight in the rear helps to keep the back wheel in play. Riders that entered this way usually did better.

Continued here...

I've just released a new plugin for Adobe Lightroom called Bag-o-Goodies. It's a (currently small) collection of little tools that don't merit their own plugin.

One tool lets you compare the shot-taken time between two pictures, such as these shots from yesterday's Kansai Cyclocross races...

... or this set showing the gap between Andy and Antti when they passed me on their final lap...

... or this set of first-shots from my first “real” camera (a Nikon D200) and my current “real” camera (a Nikon D4)....

Anyway, there are only three little tools now, but now that I have the mechanism in place to add them, I hope to expand it little by little over time.

It's available over on the Bag-o-Goodies plugin page.

Today was the last race of the local cyclocross-racing season, and I took the opportunity to see some friends race. Cyclocross bicycle racing is sort of like mini-obstacle-course bicycle racing, with a few laps on a relatively short course going over steep embankments, through mud and sand, over barriers, etc. It rained quit a bit a few days ago, so the course had plenty of photogenic mud.

I literally have not yet seen all the photos I took, but I wanted share a few so as to share the gist of the day.

There are races throughout the day for various categories, but I arrived before the first to check out the course. The cyclists were doing the same. I found one particularly-interesting area...

The mud was deceptively deep, so if you didn't see someone in it as in the photo above, it was easy to misjudge your entry and find yourself involuntarily off the bike....

A cyclocross lap generally includes sections where you must get off the bike and carry it over obstacles, but also many sections like the Mud Bath above where you can try to ride or just push/carry the bike if you think it'll be faster. Most folks chose the latter.

This included American friend Andy Clark, who was near the front in the first race, the Men's “C3” (“Category 3”) race....

Andy started this season (his first) in Category 4, which is open to all who have a bike, the entry fee, and a free Sunday. But one gets elevated to Category 3 only by earning it, which he did quickly earlier in the season.

Andy's been on my blog numerous times since I started cycling, including here, here, and here.

In cyclocross it's very good to be in front of the pack, because otherwise you can get bogged down in a clump of competitors...

After passing the Mud Bath, the course continued away, and after three 180° hairpins across various parts of an embankment, the course came back past me on the other side, up a different hill that was sufficiently-less muddy to entice more folks to try actually riding up it.

Finnish friend Antti was also in the “C3” race. He got caught behind a big pileup near the start, so was trying to claw back time. He successfully rode through the Mud Bath.

You might recall Antti from this post about how well he took care of things when a friend crashed on a group ride. He was also with my on my first ride to the ocean, among many others, including my very first ride.

The Mud Bath made for fun (for me), but it didn't usually give photos of people actually riding bicycles, and when I turned around to get folks coming back the other way, the background (the parking lot) was horrible. With the photo above, I tried to lessen the impact of the background with some creative processing.

Back to the mud-bath fun...

In their C3 race, which was three laps of the course, Andy ended up getting 8th out of 54. Antti got 11th. Very good.

German friend Christoph Millotat rode in the C4 race...

The mud was very soupy in the morning, but as riders took its moisture away on them (and their clothes and bikes), the mud got a bit firmer as the day went. But it was still mud.

As I said, there are many categories, including various levels for women. The ladies got in the mud just like the guys...

Because I was camped out at the Mud Bath, my photos haven't shown much else of the course, but here's one that gives more of an idea of some of the nastier parts...

The guy in the center of that photo illustrates a great thing about amateur cyclocross racing...

The easy categories are open to everyone and they're probably the safest kind of competitive cycling, as speeds are never very fast. One can spend a lot on a bike, but it's not required, so the real barrier to entry is mental. The guy above is obviously out of shape, but he's out there doing it, giving it a try, not giving up. He certainly got a better workout than I did just standing around all day.

And what happens when an out of shape guy like that intrudes on the world of the fit cyclist? He gets cheered on and encouraged...

Continued here...

This post is a short followup to last month's “The Scourge (or Beauty) of “Snap To Road” with iPhone Location-Tracking Apps”, in which I explained how an attempt by Apple to make the iPhone location services more relevant for car navigation can end up destroying the accuracy for other uses such as geoencoding or fitness tracking. When enabled, the user's location is “snapped” to the center of the nearest road; internally Apple calls it “Map Matching”; I call it “Snap to Road”.

In the screenshot of Google Earth seen above, the red line, recorded with the “Snap to Road” feature disabled, mostly matches up with my green-line actual path (which I drew on the map by hand from memory), but the cyan line, recorded with “Snap to Road” enabled, is ridiculously devoid of detail... it makes it appear as if I was walking down the exact center of each road; you can't see what side of the road I was on, nor even that there are turns at the edges.

Unfortunately, this iOS feature can not simply be enabled or disabled by the user or the app developer — Apple, in its infinite wisdom, chooses when it goes on and off and does not share any details (or even confirm that it happens!) — so I wanted to do more testing to understand when it does or doesn't become enabled.

Evgen Bodunov, the developer of the most-excellent Galileo Offline Maps (Name changed Feb 2019 to Guru Maps), kindly made a special version of his app for me which allowed me to explicitly choose the iOS CoreLocation service “Activity Type”. I did a bunch of riding around with the phone set to various situations, and came up with a few more details...

• “Snap to Road” is tripped on when you exceed 20kph (12mph).

  In the screenshot, notice how the cyan line matches the actual track near the start of the ride, then halfway up the “T” it snaps to the center of the road. That's when my speed crested 20kph after riding slowly from the starting point.

  I'm not sure under what conditions it turns back off; merely slowing down to below that threshold is not sufficient to turn it back off, as I could continue at a walking pace for several minutes and it would not turn off.

  In some tests merely pausing or changing direction turned it off, but in other tests seemingly-similar actions did not turn it off. This remains a mystery.

• iOS seems to require Internet access (or cached map data) for it to work.

  I disconnected my phone from the Internet (turned on airplane mode and turned off WiFi) and rebooted the phone, and I could not get the “Snap to Road” to kick in, even at fairly high speeds.

  In particular, it doesn't seem to use data cached in the built-in "Maps" app, which still displays its cached data in airplane mode.

  However, upon exiting airplane mode, “Snap to Road” kicked in the next time I exceeded 20kph.

• The “OtherNavigation” activity type is the only CoreLocation activity type that does not invite “Snap to Road” on its own.

  This is a confirmation of what I reported previously, that even at high speeds, “Snap to Road” remain thankfully disabled with OtherNavigation. The other three activity types all get “Snap to Road” at 20kph.

  (However, there's still the caveat that if any app triggers “Snap to Road”, all apps get “Snap to Road”.)

As expected, I've not heard any reply from Apple on the bug report I submitted.

The old Kyoto Theater Hall near my house reopened today after some years of renovation, emerging as “ROHM Theater Kyoto” (ロームシアター京都). ROHM is a semiconductor company based here in Kyoto, last mentioned on my blog more than 10 years ago, before I got into photography or even blogging that much, on this post about their annual Christmas lights at their company headquarters. They must have paid a boatload of money to someone to get branding rights for this renovated concert/theater complex.

I have a vague recollection of seeing some kind of performance at the original theater 25 years ago, when trekking this deep into Kyoto was a rare thing for me. (I lived in Takatsuki City at the time).

More recently, the old hall was the site of the Presidential visit seen 10 years ago in “Presidential Visit means REALLY BIG hubbub”, and since we live nearby, it's been in the background of numerous shots, such as this and this and this and this and this.

Anyway, we don't really care about the theater itself, but the BIG BIG BIG excitement of the reopening is that it now includes a combined TSUTAYA Bookstore ＋ Starbucks Coffee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The theater had grand-opening events all day, but we were interested only in the 4:30pm grand opening of the Starbucks. We didn't know whether thousands might be waiting in line or no one, but we wanted to check things out so we headed over there a bit before.

It was bustling but not crazy. We showed up to find that they had taken pity on all those waiting in line and opened early, so the line was moving along briskly by the time we entered, and the wait was 20 minutes.

We like Starbucks coffee and even if it were a normal Starbucks we'd be pleased that it's close (but not within sight 😉 ). The real attraction for us, though, is the combination with the bookstore and the lounge-like areas; we envision that we can retreat there for some quiet “quality time” with a book (or, in my case, with the free Wifi).

On the way out of the restaurant / cafe / book building, I noticed that the floor was some very nice lightly-sculpted woodwork. I wonder how long the protruding ridges will last.

We took a look at the theater building as well. The main theater was completely rebuilt, but the sub-theater and the rest of the building were merely remodeled. Sadly, we weren't allowed to see the new main theater.

The gates barring the way, rather than some kind of impersonal security gate, were made of nicely-stained wood with a nice modern Japanese aesthetic....

The whole area is getting a makeover. This past autumn the final leg of Jingu Street (“Shrine Street”), which dead-ended into the Heian Shrine, was closed off and turned into a pedestrian mall.

Compare with this photo from about the same place eight years ago, as seen on “Snowy Round Trip to the Heian Shrine”...

The small playground that Anthony used to play in was also remodeled, with the location of things shuffled around...

The apparatus^* are the same, but if you use the “nearby photos” link to compare to the many prior photos from the area, it becomes apparent that the locations are all different.

*	Note to my mom: I realize that the plural of “apparatus” is “apparatuses”, but I invoke artistic license to use “apparatus” as singular and plural, 'cause it sounds better to me.

The reshuffling was apparently done to make space for a tourist-information center (for Japanese tourists; I saw no information in any other language) housed in an old streetcar, which you can see in the background of the photo above.

The very first electrical-power generation plant in all Japan was nearby, and as such the nearby Niomon Street was the first in Japan to have streetlights and streetcars, so the old streetcar here is apropos.

All in all it was a nice family outing.