I played a bit of ping-pong today with a family friend, 91-year-old Vernon Weingart. I almost didn't lose.

今日は９１歳の友達と一緒に卓球をさせてもらいました。 もうチョットで勝ちそうでしたが、結局負けました。 約十年前、高齢者オリンピックでアメリカの二位だった方です。 今でも強いです！

He was the USA National 2nd-place champion, back when he was younger (in his 80s), and Ohio State Champion five or six times along the way. Some of his trophies and medals...

He is the personification of “kindly grandfather type”, who walks slowly and with purpose, always has a kind word and an easy smile.

We all knocked the ball around for a while, then as we were about to leave, he suggested an actual game. A real game with Anthony wouldn't have been fun (Anthony would have been utterly crushed), but I offered some hope that he'd have to at least keep one eye open.

We decided on the best two out of three...

And suddenly his demeanor completely changed. Gone was the kindly smile, replaced by eyes with laser focus and determination. Take no prisoners. It was a shocking transformation, but in retrospect it's unsurprising, given his competitive achievements.

I'm not great at ping-pong, but I'm not bad either. I can inflict some wicked unpredictable spins, and at times can smash with thunderous power, even from behind and below the table.

I won the first game after going to deuce.

He won the next two. Both games were close... I suspect that's how he crafted it, to keep it interesting. He aced me on his serve only once.

We ended with a firm “good game” handshake, and a promise that I'll give him a better game next time.

But in my defense, he's not really 91 years old yet... his birthday is tomorrow.

UPDATE: I gave him that rematch.

Last month before heading off on my trip to The States to visit my folks, I did a nice little bicycle to Onyu Pass and back, an 85 mile (137km) round trip over two other major passes each way. I was joined by veteran riders Arthur Lauritsen and Neil Holt.

My first visit to Onyu Pass had been during a day of incessant rain a month prior, and as such the supposedly-spectacular views were shrouded in clouds. I hoped for something better this time, but was left disappointed due to the extreme haze of the hot (35℃/95℉) humid air.

At first glance it may not seem so hazy in the photo above, but that's the result of a lot of post processing, including the new “dehaze” feature in Adobe Lightroom.

I didn't pull out the camera until three hours into the ride when we came across a field of flowers in front of an old farmhouse while descending from Nomi Pass. They were pretty, though this camera (or my skill with this camera) doesn't do them justice.

3½ hours into the ride we came to the last vending machine before the hot climb, so I stopped to load up on drinks. Had to wait in line behind this little frog...

A separate little friend tried to hitch a ride on Authur's bike...

The main climb to Onyu Pass is 4.5km at 8%, which isn't so bad except that there's no tree cover the whole way except for about 10 seconds about halfway up, and it was a hot humid windless day.

Neil rocketed up in an astounding 17:28, just missing the course record (among those using Strava) by two seconds. I took more than 40% longer at 24:44.

Arthur came up some time later looking hot and uncomfortable, but not so much that he couldn't ham it up for the camera...

After a rest and some snacks, we turned around to head home by the same route we came.

The road up to Onyu pass is mostly clear, but perhaps particularly with a typhoon that had come through a few days earlier some areas were strewn with rocks.

It's apparently much better than it was a few months ago when a larger group from Cycling Kyoto came through and got a total of five flats (from the sharp rocks) among them. No rock-induced flats for us today.

Part of the way down, the view opens up to the valley below and you can see the road you came in on winding itself up the mountain. The extreme haze made for an unspectacular view, but I've eked a few shots out.

I waited for Arthur and Neil to make their way down to where I could see them on the road below, and I was surprised that it took 5+ minutes for them to get down there. It feels long on the way up, but somehow I usually think the descent shouldn't take any time at all. But it does.

Eventually I made my way down to find them waiting for me in the shade at the bottom of the mountain.

The 20km-stretch south of the Onyu Pass area is really lovely and quaint.

The road is usually fairly narrow, but during a section that was wider I wanted to get a photo of Neil from the side, but he was just too fast for me to catch up to. By the time he slowed down enough, the road was narrower and the background less interesting...

I don't know what the colored ribbons on the trees are. They seem to be more involved than simple forestry/timber markers, yet not involved enough to be tree huggies. I doubt it's just decoration, but I'm at a loss to guess what it might be.

Very pretty area, though.

The other day I got to witness the most amazing experience of watching a lady in her 70s touch an iPad for the first time, and right before my eyes the delight and sparkle on her face transformed her into a young girl again. It was magical.

Yet this experience at an Apple Store in Ohio was marred by some shockingly un-Apple bumps in the road.

I'm in America visiting my folks, and took the opportunity of being here to help Ann, a family friend in her 70s, buy her first computer. Until now her most technically-advanced electronics were a flip-phone and a television, but she was ready to take the plunge into email and Facebook. She was familiar with the unrelenting grief and despair Windows caused her husband, so she wanted something different. We headed to the Apple Store.

It was packed, which as an AAPL shareholder I always like to see.

We were soon attended to by staff, and I let Ann interact with them, describing what she wanted a computer for, and listening to their ideas and recommendations.

First she was shown the lowest-end MacBook Air, a tiny laptop. My mom has one of these and earlier at lunch had shown it to Ann, and had raved all about it, so prior to arriving at the store, Ann and I thought that she'd probably buy a MacBook Air. Under direction of the Apple sales staff, Ann used a MacBook Air for some basic web surfing and email, and seemed pleased. She took to it easily.

Then she was shown the same basic browsing and email on an iPad Air. Over the course of a few minutes Ann's demeanor changed from mild interest (she'd heard of these “iPad” things before) to pure, unfettered delight.

I've never seen anything like it, and I cannot begin to adequately describe the situation.

Ann has a youth and vibrance that belies her age, with an easy laugh and smile that I've seen many times, but nothing prepared me for the reaction written across her face... giddy, unadulterated, sparkling delight. There's no other word for it.

As she exclaimed “This is it, this is for me!”, I told her that the sparkle in her eyes made her look 30 years younger, but in reality the only time I've ever seen something even close is when a young child gets the toy they've been wanting. But this was less materialistic, more pure. I imagined a duck living in the desert for decades not knowing that water even existed, finally entering a lake for the first time. I feel I'm a better person just for having witnessed it.

In comparison, the exuberant “amaaaazing” reaction of my 23-month-old niece to her first iPad experience seems pale (but if you've not heard the short audio on that post, it'll certainly bring a smile to your heart).

Anyway, Ann bought an iPad Air, a wireless keyboard, and a case/cover, and Apple staff helped her set it up. Both before and after the sale, staff spent considerable time with her, never rushing, never pressuring, always patient. Ann felt truly the center of their attention, with their concern not for the sale but for her happiness and satisfaction. It was a wonderful experience.

That was the good. The rest of this long story is not always so good.

---

Setup of the iPad involved creating Ann's first email account, and this is where I got my first surprise of the day.

I figured that they would create an iCloud account for her, but no, to create an Apple ID they needed an email account from outside the Apple ecosystem, so they created a GMail account for her. This struck me as very odd, but hey, they're the experts.

They then used her GMail address to create an Apple ID for her, and set up her iPad. They helped her install the Apple Store app, then used that to schedule a free training class at the store next week.

Pleased as punch and floating on air, we went to her house to show her husband, and we sat for some basic lessons. I showed Ann how to surf the web, make bookmarks, do email and create contacts, Facetime video conference, use the camera, check the calendar, talk to Siri, etc. She took to it very easily.

But we ran into some problems that I didn't know how to solve.

Disappointment #1 for the day was that the iPad Air Smart Case didn't seem to fit her iPad Air very well, and the hole for the camera didn't line up properly. When deciding on what model of iPad to buy, Apple staff had explained the differences between the “iPad Air” and the “iPad Air 2” included subtle physical differences like the location of the camera, so it seemed to me that Ann must have been sold the wrong case. Yet the labeling on the box for the case (“iPad Air Smart Case”) clearly matched the labeling on the box for the iPad (“iPad Air”) — neither referenced the “Air 2” we'd seen on packaging for the newer models — so I was confused.

Disappointment #2 for the day was in my call to Apple Care to ask about the issue. The lady who answered my call seemed utterly uninterested in life, doing her job on autopilot just to get to the end of the shift. I've had more enthusiastic calls with the DMV.

So we went back to the Apple Store and showed the clearly-misaligned camera hole along with the clearly-matching packaging. I figured we be told “yikes, sorry about that, here's the proper case”, but instead we got an inexplicable “Yeah, sorry, it's hard to explain”.

The guy tried to explain something that he clearly didn't understand well himself, causing me to finally interrupt him and say “look, she just wants a case that fits her iPad. She doesn't care what it's called... can you show her something that actually fits what she just bought?”.

Again the response was unexpected. I thought he'd say “Sure, just a moment”, but instead we got a “I don't know, but we can go take a look.”. Wow, this was not the Apple Experience I was expecting. How hard can it be?

It was a fiasco. They had a huge wall of cases, with half clearly marked “iPad Air 2” and the other half clearly marked “iPad Air”. You'd think that it couldn't be simpler, but in reality all the cases were for the iPad Air 2, including those marked “iPad Air”. Why were they explicitly labeled differently when they were explicitly for the same device, and explicitly incompatible with the device for which it was labeled??? It was beyond surreal.

The guy explained that if you looked on the back of the “iPad Air” package, the little sticker with the barcode included microscopic text that said “(second generation)”, meaning it was for the iPad Air 2. The logical person inside of me wanted to explode at the stupidity of it... not only of the misleading labeling, but mostly at the unmitigated stupidity of how the Apple Store handled the display and sales. The guy who sold Ann the iPad Air explicitly mentioned the differences between the models and explicitly told her that the iPad Air 2 cases wouldn't fit her purchase, yet somehow didn't realize that the “iPad Air” cases wouldn't either. This was his job. How could Apple Staff not know this? The Air 2 has been on sale for almost a year... were we the first to discover this crazy labeling. Beyond surreal.

In marveling at the absurdity of the situation, I happened to noticed that one of the “iPad Air” cases did not have the “second generation” microtext on the back. Oh, we're told, this one does fit Ann's purchase. Apple Staff hadn't realized they had these mixed in there. Of perhaps the 70 “iPad Air” cases on display, I noticed three that would fit Ann's “iPad Air”. She didn't like the color, but it was that or nothing, so she exchanged the case. The guy offered to order her the color of her choice and swap it out when it arrived, but by this time we just wanted to move on.

(The only plausible explanation for the labeling that I can come up with is that when Apple started selling cases for the new iPad Air 2, they still had a huge stockpile of packaging for the original model that they didn't want to waste, so they shoved the new cases into the old packaging and slapped the microtext sticker on the back. When that ran out, new packaging included the proper “iPAd Air 2” on the front, and this mix of labels we saw at the store reflected the mix of old and new stock. On the other hand, I have not been able to come up with a plausible explanation for how the Apple Store handles this mix as they do, utter than pure apathy and incompetence.)

Overall, what a disappointing, un-Apple-like experience. Things were about to get worse.

I had two questions about the email app, both leading down holes I never would have imagined.

The first seemed pretty simple: why is there no “trash” icon when viewing an email message? How do you delete a message? The identical app on my iPhone has a trash icon that's obvious and intuitive, but on Ann's iPad the same spot instead has what looks like a filing-cabinet icon whose purpose didn't seem apparent, and upon testing we couldn't figure out what it actually did.

The guy spent a considerable time in the labyrinth of iPad settings and couldn't figure it out, so we put that on the back burner and moved on.

My second question was about push notifications for new messages. It didn't surprise me that push notifications wouldn't work when connected only via Wifi, so I just asked to confirm this. But no, I was told that they should work. Ann wasn't getting notifications when I sent test emails, so the guy dives again into the labyrinth of settings for what seemed an eternity, only to end up suggesting to switch from GMail to iCloud for her email.

Just a few hours prior we'd been told that a non-iCloud account was required, but now we were being told to switch to iCloud. I didn't want Ann to have to juggle two email addresses, but no worries, Apple Staff told us, we'll switch your Apple ID registration to your iCloud address so that you can completely abandon the GMail address. Geez, okay, why didn't we do this from the start, but okay, let's do it.

So he create the new account and we explained everything to Ann, who for the first time in the long day was starting to show signs of being overwhelmed. Once things were finally set up, test emails from me showed up on her iPad with immediate notifications as we wanted, so it was worth it. Then he went to switch her Apple ID registration over to her iCloud address so that she could completely abandon the GMail address they'd made for her earlier, and he hit a snag... it wouldn't let him switch.

Clearly this staff member was outside his area of expertise, but instead of asking one of his more-experienced colleagues, he starts Googling for a solution. This did not inspire confidence, and I “strongly encouraged” him to ask someone for help. He did, and the end result was that we backpedaled on the whole iCloud thing, reverted back to GMail, and simply gave up on push notifications. By this point the store was closing and we just wanted to get out of there.

But somewhere along the way he had figured out how to get the trash icon for Ann, so at least we had that going for us.

Overall Ann was thrilled with her first foray into high tech, but wow, the experiences at the Apple Store sure put a damper on things. As a tech geek I was mortified, and as an APPL shareholder I worry how this bodes for Apple's future.

If you ride a bicycle for long distances, as I have been wont to do lately, you want to feel comfortable on the bike and ride with a posture that doesn't lead to injury. If something is so obviously uncomfortable that you notice it right away then of course you correct it or at least try something else, but it's the subtle poor riding posture that can insidiously lead to long-term injury.

I often get numbness in my fingers after a long ride, and my own brother had to give up cycling after a long ride left him with chronic pain. As I move toward more serious cycling and a more serious bike (and further into an age where injuries take a long time to heal if they heal at all), I thought I'd take the precaution to do things right by having a session at Vincent Flanagan's PedalForth Fitting.

Vincent is a former professional cyclist with an impressive resume... Australian National Mountain Bike Champion (1991), and two-time All-Japan National Mountain Bike Champion (1996, 1997). His non-cycling background is nursing and sports massage.

I thought I'd learn what size bike was appropriate for me, and perhaps how to adjust the seat and handlebar locations to best suit me, but I was surprised to learn so much more.

But first, let's look at some of what a “bike fitting” entails. German friend and ultra-marathon runner Thomas Busch, who cycles just to augment his run training, did a fitting just before me, graciously allowing me to watch and photograph.

I couldn't photograph (or remember) everything that went into it, but here are a few of the high points...

First there's an interview where Vincent asks about your cycling history, equipment, goals, desires, relevant medical history, etc.

Then Vincent takes an inventory of your current bicycle setup...

The shape and construction of the bicycle frame apparently has a strong impact as to how it rides, but from a rider-posture point of view, only three things matter: the location of the pedals, seat, and handlebars. Those are the locations where the rider attaches to the bike, so nothing else really matters, from a posture point of view.

Everything is measured with respect to the crank axle at the bottom of the frame. From what I recall, for the seat the measurements include how far above and behind the crank axle, as well as its tilt and size and cushioning. For the handlebars, how far above and forward. For the pedals, how far from the axle and how they attach to the shoes. Of course, proper shoes and how they attach to the bike are also important.

Vincent takes an inventory of your current setup prior to making any adjustment.

After taking inventory of the current setup, Vincent takes inventory of some important body characteristics that influence what kind of riding posture is appropriate...

Finally it's time to measure posture on the bike...

In the end, an experience cyclist may end up finding out nothing more than “your current setup is good”, and if that's all you get for the $200 fee, it may at first seem steep, but I look at it in the same way as insurance: you do it because you don't know the result ahead of time. I spent $1,000 on travel health insurance for the family's RV trip across America earlier this year. We ended up not needing it, thankfully, but that doesn't meant it was a $1,000 waste.... it was a prudent hedge against uncertainty.

After Thomas' fitting, it was my turn. Thomas kindly took a few photos along the way...

I have very flat feet, with no arch in my foot whatsoever. When I did the single-foot squat test, most of my energy was not spent on lowering my body, but instead on trying to stabilize my body above my foot/ankle. A normal person with a normal arch wouldn't have to waste that energy. Vincent then placed a small folded towel under my arch to provide makeshift support, and the single-foot squat was suddenly much easier.

This revelation was shocking to me, as I never gave a thought to the mechanical problems caused by flat feet. Until now, I thought it merely impacted shoe-fit comfort.

I'd done that single-foot squat test a week prior when I'd stopped by to make and appointment (and ended up chatting for an hour), so when I came today I brought a box of various arch-support insoles that I'd accumulated over the years. I didn't have any cycling shoes at the time, but Thomas lent me his for the fitting.

(As I write this, I'm visiting my folks in The States, and through the magic of Zappos.com I now have two pair of cycling shoes of my own. It seems that European sizing is used for cycling shoes regardless of where you are in the world; my pairs are size 48 from one company and 49 from another.)

The bike-fitting machine includes the ability to monitor the power output of your pedal stroke, and that data, along with much else, is displayed on the computer display...

The machine went up to 450 watts, which I could do easily for a short period. The pros can do that for long periods, which is why they're pros and I am not.

In the end I got lots of good tips about posture and shoes and riding styles, and detailed specific information about what size bike is appropriate for me. I'm in the process of ordering a “real” bicycle now, which hopefully will be waiting for me when I return to Kyoto. Then I'll go back to Vincent to put the fitting's results to practical use in final adjustments on the new bike.

( Update: I did get a new bike and did have Vincent set it up for me. )

Overall it was a great experience and I learned a lot; if you are near Kyoto and ride often, I highly recommend it. His web site is currently in Japanese only, but of course he can conduct the fitting in English as well.

On a morning bicycle ride other day to Kyoto's western mountains, I made a few snapshots of Hirosawa Lake. It feels like it's a million miles from anywhere, but it's actually just one mile northeast from the teeming tourist crowds in the Arashiyama area.