13 posts tagged “sakk”
It was one lovely day yesterday that most of my colleagues who I usually go out for lunch with came to the office by their bikes, including Akira, the newest addition to the bike club. I don't know why but we always choose to do burgers when we BTL. We first thought it would be Kua Aina again, but then I found The Great Burger at Harajuku in Google search results. They are also blogging in MT.
It was when we arrived at Cat Street that I realized it was probably the first time in more than a decade for me to walk the street. However the street has changed as it had shops for big names such as Nike, Gregory, and Adidas which told me that those days of small but nice clothes shops seems to have already gone for more than a few years.
The Great Burger was great, and they had a few cute dogs in and outside of the restaurant. After the lunch, Taichi and Atsushi tried my bike for a few minutes and both looked impressed with what a road bike could offer its rider. I tried Akira's new bike and found it was pretty cool.
The plan was to ride an endurance race next year when I organized the SAKK Bike Club.
This Sunday, it has been accomplished.
Atsushi, Taichi and I together rode our bikes on the world class grand prix circuit for four hours and went 19 laps.
The target was 20 laps in 4 hours but we did the best we could. It was greater experience than I expected, that we rode our bikes among 4000 other biking enthusiasts from all over the country.
We arrived at the race course at 4 am in the morning after we left the camping lodge near the course at 3:30. There was already traffic jam until they opened the gate at 4:30. We secured our pit spot to sit down and waited for until 7 when the course was open for the trial run. The circuit was great. The circuit is ran by Honda, and it saw some Indy car races. Yes, it may be less than 40 mph, but we were on our bikes on the circuit!
We missed 2 minutes to go for the 20th lap as I crossed the line at 4:01:54.51. Team Movable Type was at 104th among 262 teams of the same category. We won't stop at the 20th lap next year.
This Saturday consumed 2500kcal of me in 3.5 hours bike ride from home to the Chigasaki beach. Folks from SAKK held another set of now infamous SAKK BBQ session at Chigasaki beach in order to welcome Miyagawa-san's visit and Asaka-san's "homecoming". I was supposed to be absent this time due to some reason, but I wasn't able to hold myself back from the idea of riding another 77km and join one of the "funnest" party.
So I woke up at 630am and started at 730am to go down on the Route 15, Route 16 and Route 134 to the beach. I created the different route this time from the one I used the last time, to enjoy the seaside run a little more and possibly to keep away from the boring road of high traffic and narrow shoulder around Ofuna station. That made the route 15km longer than the last one, but it was okay because it was going to be one way ride - I was going to drink beer, wine and champagne there!
It turned out that the connecting road between Route 16 (Yokosuka side) to the Route 134 (Hayama) was fairly narrow and had two steep road to climb hills. A few other riders came up from the other side of the road and we made eye contact and smiled at each other. I heard before that it has been supposed to be that way when two bikers met on the road, but it definitely surprised me when I actually did it without thinking.
Chigasaki BBQ Ride | Road Biking | Odawaracho, Tokyo-to, Japan | MotionBased Dashboard
After 77km in 3.5hours, I arrived at the beach and had fun time with SAKK folks. Meat, beer, wine, swimming, chatting, seeing people we have been missing and celebrating Miyagawa-san's birthday with the biggest cake I have ever seen. Another fabulously successful weekend party organized by the Six Apart Party Planning Department.The second challenge of packing the bike did not go as successful as the party itself, but Taichi and I were able to bring our bikes on the train and reached home safe. Thanks everybody!
Tomorrow we go barbecue
We burn papers as firewood
It's like a riot on the grill
My griddle riot songBBQ Riot Song by ELLEGARDEN
I rode another few kilometers in the weekend on my bike, this time to join SAKK barbecue session at Akikawa Riverside Barbecue Park. I woke up at 6am and started to run at a few minutes passed 7am. I lost again at around Oimachi station because all the road that passed over the railroad was closed for bikes and small vehicles and I was not able to find a railroad crossing. That sucked, but once I could see Tama River, it was a pretty easy ride. It should be about 60km but I forgot to start recording the waypoints a few times during the ride, so this time the tracking record of the route is not accurate.
I met Taichi at the entrance of the barbecue park. The sun was indeed "shining like a blaze", but the Chef Yuji started to prepare great meal for us so we were able to ride another few minutes to go to the onsen place which Taichi found on the net. The path to the onsen was hard though that it had a few steep hills before we could finally reach to the bath. The road should be a known good bike riding course because I saw five or six groups of serious bike riders on the road.
Onsen bath was great, but I was so exhausted I mostly enjoyed the water bath and a few minutes of sauna. It was the first time I coulld use the water bath - I have always tried but it has been too cold for me - it was amazingly refreshing this time.
The party was over at around 5pm, but SAKK bike club had one more topic in their agenda for the day; break the bike into pieces and put them in the bag. In Tokyo you can't just bring your bike in a train car. You have to put it in the bag and there are bags sold for the purpose. Taichi and I arrived at the station, broke the bike to the frame and two tires, put it in the bag and tied them up. It may sound easy but it was not. I was not able to finish it by my own for I could not put the strap belt correctly because the instruction sucked and I was probably drunk. We were able to finish it and could catch the rapid service train, so it should be good for this is the first time to do it for both of us. I need more practice though because the tires and the frame were not tied up enough that it moved and contacted with each other only to create many scratches.
All in all, it was a fun weekend ride. Now I can put my bike in the bag, I can go farther away from Tokyo with my bike. I am looking forward to riding my bike in the place I haven't been before.
My wife and I invited friends from SAKK and had a party last night. It was a pack of 10+ guys and a cute girl, we decided to show how men could cook well. So, we gathered at 4pm at my station, went for shopping vegetables, meat, fruit, seasonings and everything, and went up to our home to make 200 pieces of gyoza, and some 30 pieces of spring roll.
These guys were amazingly cooperative, as they didn't leave much of the result of cooking - no dirty dishes, pots and pans. No doubt our software is amazingly great.
Then at 7pm the annual Tokyo Bay Fireworks show began. Fireworks could be watched at from our balcony all right (although I could not take any picture this year).
Fun time.
シールが貼ってある物の写真を撮ってください。
Take a picture of something that someone put a sticker on.
...so we don't make TP too hot and MT too cool at the same time.
いつの間に。
Go for it Vox!
Vox-JPがオープンしたし、Movable Typeチームはこの何ヶ月かチョーがんばったので、ご褒美にGMがロゼのシャンパンを日本とUSの両方に贈ってくれた。
太平洋夏時間で夕方6時なので、It's five 'o clock somewhereの原則に従ってカンパイ。
まだまだ熱いぜMTチーム。
Movable Type Team has been doing great in these months. To celebrate what has been done and boost what will be in the next releases, we did a small party this *evening*. MT GM sent both Japan and US team a bottle of champagne which was in pink. We all live in the PDT zone today. I should wear my helmet in the office in case I fall down to the floor by the end of the day. It's five o clock somewhere.
The second bi-weekly Engineering Exchange went very well today. We had Moavble Type team introduced shiny new mt-wizard.cgi
... and Vox team gave us some glance behind the cartain of how their project has been managed
... and TypePad team introduced its newest member Sakai-san.
TypepPad team also asked for suggestion about how to do something and we had a good adhoc discussion.
After the lightning updates from each product team, Tanimoto-san gave us the great presentation of Vim Basics.
The presentation went awsome. Lots of good tips for Vim-ers, laughs, and even a battle between emacs folks. Every press of his keyboard Tanimoto-san led the audience go like "Ah!", "Wow", and "Uh".
The geeky heads gathered together and once again had a good time.
