polk county biking

Here’s a quiz for you… What do deer, old cars, a saw mill, and black bears all have in common? These are all things I regularly see on my rides around polk county. The countryside by our cabin is some of the best riding around, every road is paved and very lightly travelled. I can ride around any number of lakes and have all kinds of flexibility to make a route that is anywhere from 12 to 50 miles long. Bone Lake, Half Moon, Pipe, Balsam, Little Blake, Butternut, these are a few of the lakes that I loop in and through on a regular basis.

So, the other night I took my camera for a ride and focused more on the picture taking that the riding. Here’s my favorite shot from the night and you can find the rest of them here:IMG_1264.jpg

Incidentally, this picture illustrates where the bear comes in to the picture. This little pond is at the bottom of a little hill and around a nice little corner. One morning a came coasting down the hill and around the corner to see a black bear, he would have been right in the bottom right corner of the picture. I don’t know which of us was more surprised! The bear took off one way and I took off as fast as I could up the hill and past the pond. We’ve never seen each other again.

beautifulsoup, bonktown and growl

Here’s a little script that combines two of my favorite pass times. Python programming and cycling. bonktown.com is a great site that has steep discounts on road cycling gear. They only sell one item at a time and they typically sell that item until it is gone. I’ve gotten some great deals on clothing and other stuff on that site. Bonktown helps you know whats currently for sale in a number of ways, including a nice dashboard widget that pops up a notifier when something new comes on sale. The problem is that over time I’ve started to ignore the growl notifiers for bonktown, because I’m not interested in lots of the stuff they sell.

So, I wrote this python script that allows me to look for the stuff I am interested in buying. It works by having a file of regular expressions that I use to search the item descriptions when something goes on sale at bonktown. If the item matches something I’m looking for then I get a Growl notification. If not then I don’t hear about it.

Here’s the code:


#!/usr/bin/env python2.6

import re
import urllib
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import Growl

name = “MyBonk”   # was BonkMe
notifications = [“search_hit”]
notifier = Growl.GrowlNotifier(name,notifications)
notifier.register()

# Read file of search Terms
myTerms = open("/Users/bmiller/lib/bonk_items.txt").readlines()


# Get the latest page
bt = urllib.urlopen("www.bonktown.com")

doc = BeautifulSoup(bt.read())

itemlist = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“item_title”))
price = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“price”))
desc = doc.findAll(id=re.compile(“item_description”))

for term in myTerms:
    for i in range(len(itemlist)):
        if itemlist[i] and re.search(term[:-1],itemlist[i].contents[0],re.IGNORECASE):
            notifier.notify(“search_hit”,
                            itemlist[i].contents[0],
                            desc[i].contents[7].contents[0],
                            sticky=False)



This script makes use of several modules:

  • Growl

  • BeautifulSoup

  • urllib

  • re



I would have liked to use one of the standard library html/xml parsers, but I could not find one that was as convenient or easy to use as BeautifulSoup. If you can tell me how to parse messy html with one of the standard library xml modules please let me know.

a mid-winter cycling treat

Although the weather back home may have been below zero, in Northern california he sun was out and it was 68 degrees. Perfect weather for a bikeride. So after talking to the nice folks at the Palo Alto Bike Shop Wes and I rented a couple of nice demo road bikes from Calmar bikes in Santa Clara. Calmar is right by our hotel and the staff there was super friendly and helpful in getting us set up for a ride. Incidentally Calmar has no relation to Calmar IA. I road a nice Spanish BH RoadROM and Wes road a hot pink Trek Pilot 5.2. Even though the bike was pink we felt pretty good passing all the californians on the way up Old La Honda Road.

Rather than head out from the hotel on the busy city streets I decided to take Novian’s advice and head into the foothills west of Palo Alto. You can see the ride we took on the map below. This is from a cool website called mapmyride.com that I will use in the future for keeping track of my rides.



The ride was just beautiful even though we had to climb 2500 feet to get to the view. On the way up we road through some big redwood trees.

Redwoods on Old La Honda Road


Once you get on Skyline drive you can see the ocean on one side and the Valley on the other. Here’s me, I look more tired in the picture than I actually felt! Really, Honest!

Brad -- Looks tired after the long climb

The rest of the ride is a long coast down Page Mill Road and then some flat riding past the Stanford Dish and the Stanford Golf course. It would have been fun to stop and play 18 holes but I didn’t have my clubs with me.