This summer marks the opening of a remarkable number of bicycle and pedestrian improvement projects (trails, bridges, etc.) in the Bay Area. The two that most impact my commute opened this week: On Sunday, the Stevens Creek Trail opened the new segment to Sleeper Avenue, and today, the Mary Avenue Footbridge opened, connecting Cupertino and Sunnyvale with a cable-stayed steel pedestrian and bicycle bridge across Interstate 280. I went with a group of people from work and attended the dedication this afternoon. It was fun; the Homestead High School band played, there were speeches by mayors, city council members, bicycle advocates, VTA and engineering firm leaders, and they cut a ribbon with oversize novelty scissors. I got to chat with an employee of the engineering firm that designed the bridge, and learned the secret to why they were able to design a steel bridge to fit the city’s budget after the bids for a traditional concrete bridge all came back about $10 million too high; the materials actually cost more, but they were able to make a design that could be built simply and quickly (twenty nights of closing single lanes of 280), saving time and labor.

I’ve been biking home from work almost every day for a year, and I had settled on a route home I liked (and then again after we moved last fall), but the past few weeks I’ve been experimenting with different routes to try to find faster or better ways to get to and from work. These new projects definitely help. My door-to-door times had been around 45-50 minutes; this week I’ve been taking the Stevens Creek Trail home all the way from the new Sleeper trailhead, and yesterday I got home in 39 minutes. Today, using the Mary Ave bridge I made it home in 36 minutes. So that’s a big improvement; if I biked both directions (which I haven’t been doing, but might start again), this saves me 20 minutes a day.

One thing I find interesting when comparing routes is that speed and distance have only marginal correlation. The route I took home today is almost a mile longer than the one I took home a week ago, but it got me here ten minutes faster. And the route I took today is about a quarter-mile longer than the one I took yesterday, but was almost five minutes shorter. Bicycles do best when they are moving, and finding straight flat routes with minimal stops, sharp turns and obstacles is more important than pure distance, although that does matter. I also avoid some routes that might be faster, because they either seem unsafe (automotive traffic) or boring. I find certain streets very tedious (Grant Road, for example) and can’t bring myself to include them in a regular commute.

Another approach I’ve been trying the past few days is collecting GPS data about my commute. I downloaded an iPhone app called Trailguru that captures the GPS information and uploads it to their Web site where you can view it in Google Maps or download it. Unfortunately, I haven’t found a good way to analyze the data yet; the Trailguru Web site shows you the route, but doesn’t attach speed information to it in a way that I can use. Their app is very well done, but the analytics aren’t very good. The best thing I’ve found so far is to export the data from the Web site in GPX format and import it into an Mac OS X app I found called TrailRunner, which at least lets me select a segment of the route graphically and shows the distance and speed for that segment. I’d like to find something better, though—without paying Garmin a lot of money, which seems to be the traditional solution.

Since this is my first post in quite a while, I’d better include this as well: I’ve tried most of the M&M’s Premiums flavors; they’re not really real M&M’s, but they are okay. For Easter this year, they did the usual pastel-colored M&M’s, but they printed Easter-themed pictures, like rabbits and eggs, which was cute.

Speaking of rabbits, I’m really enjoying the new Annie’s Organic Snack Mix Bunnies, which I found at Whole Foods last week. I hope they make the pretzels available separately.

Yes, I am aware that five of my past seven posts have been about M&M’s.

I’m not sure if this means that the cherry M&M’s were so successful as a holiday special that they decided to sell it at other times of year, or if they were such a failure that they had enough candy left over to try and repackage it and sell out the remaining inventory.

The M&M’s Web site calls this a “limited edition” candy, so chocolate-cherry fans should stock up now!

Instructions: Open up your iTunes and fill out this survey, no matter how embarrassing the responses might be.

How many songs total: 3452

How many hours or days of music: 8.7 days

Most recently played: “Seven Drunken Nights”, Bill Craig, The Wild Rover

Most played: “I Hope That I Don’t Fall in Love With You”, Tom Waits, Closing Time

Most recently added: “Auld Lang Syne”, Rob Crabtree, The Piper’s Journey

Sort by song title

First Song: “Abilene”, Sheryl Crow, C’mon C’mon

Last Song: “1917″, Linda Ronstdadt & Emmylou Harris, Western Wall: The Tuscon Sessions

Sort by time

Shortest Song: “Patrick Henry Quote”, Wee Sing America (0:07) — that’s spoken; the shortest song with music is “‘The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show’ Theme” from Go Simpsonic With The Simpsons (0:14)

Longest Song: “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree”, Arlo Guthrie, The Best of Arlo Guthrie (18:37)

Sort by album

First album: Absolute Torch and Twang, k.d. lang

Last album: 40 Greatest Hits, Hank Williams

First song that comes up on Shuffle: “Echoes of Love”, Elvis Presley, The “Lost” Album

Search the following and state how many songs come up:

Death – 7

Life – 57

Love – 154

Hate – 1 (and it’s found “Whatever Became of Herbert” by Tom Lehrer—I have no songs with the word hate in the title!)

You – 324

Sex – 2

• 6 series…
• 30 seasons (and 10 movies)…
• 224 DVDs…
• 726 episodes (and 10 movies)…
• 33539 minutes (i.e., 23 days, 6 hours and 59 minutes)…

…of Star Trek. Whew.

I finished the last episode of Enterprise last night. Not quite sure what to watch now.

I have a theater background, and in theater nobody ever asks is it a drama or a comedy, just is it a musical or a non-musical. This is a non-musical.

If Sorkin wrote a musical, I’d go see it.

As I feared, the Enterprise DVDs aren’t any better than the other series’. You still have to wait through several minutes of opening warnings, credits and a video sequence before you can pick an episode. Actually, I think the Enterprise DVDs are a little worse than the other series in term of usability. Each disc has four episodes, and this is what the episode selection menu looks like (this is actually from season two since it’s what I have on-hand; season one is the same):

Although English does usually obey the rule of left-to-right before top-to-bottom, the visual divider between the left and right groups makes it look for all the world like two columns of selections, so that the correct episode order would be 028, 029, 027, 031 instead of the correct 028, 027, 029, 031 (the out-of-order episode numbers don’t help). But it is nice that the episodes are presented in widescreen, so my DVD player’s entire screen is filled. Also, unlike the previous series (but like the animated series), there are commentaries and deleted scenes for a few episodes.

I think the experts say to check your tire pressure every time you ride the bike, or at any rate more frequently than I do. I always seem to remember it when I’m at the other end of my commute from my bike pump, and by the time I’ve gotten home, I’ve forgotten. I don’t know exactly how long it’s been (a few months at least), but I normally inflate the tires to 65 PSI, and they were around 20, so that’s not great.