this morning at 5:30 I was on my bike for a quickie before work. it was 39 degrees, which is warm for 5:30a in early June. I cruised up Gold Run right away, imagining the pain and suffering to come on June 20th at the Gold Run Rush. Soon it leveled off and I got my pedal on just past Drew's place. After about 15min it was high-speed, big-ringin' singeltrack for the next 3mi back to CR450. My first ride of the original 'stock run' after work or pre-work special. 6.2mi in 37min. Short, but oh so sweet. The last 2min of descending on the Upper Flume is heavenly. Nothing is as fun on a road bike. Riding the road machine, even the nicest stretches of curvy descending down narrow forest roads in the Gila Natl Forest can't compare to descending on a mtb.
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A guy I work with visited Google's HQ in CA last month. AKA the Googleplex. Below is an excerpt from an email he sent-
Willy Wonka and the Search Factory
Google invited us along with only 5 other agencies nationwide to visit their headquarters in Mountain View in May. Most people have heard of the Googleplex, but I must say that you really have to see it in person to understand. They have truly built a Utopian workplace if there ever was one. Google started with a 4-plex of old Silicon Graphics offices and have slowly cannibalized every building surrounding them. Today they number about 25 buildings and require constant shuttles to get around between them. (As well as other mobile inventions that whizzed by at random times)
Upon arrival we passed the on-site barber (use at your own risk), the volleyball courts, a huge fully equipped gym, then across the courtyard a full-sized T-Rex skeleton chasing down some plastic pink flamingos caught our eye outside the lobby. Just inside the lobby they’ve hung a replica of SpaceShipOne (The rocket that won Richard Branson’s contest) over the stairs.
There’s a college-campus feel to the place, but it goes so much deeper than that. On the walls of the lobby there are pictures of famous political and business thinkers that have visited recently; the Hillary’s, Al Gore’s, Jack Welch’s and even the Dalai Lamas of the world. Apparently they have a couple of keynote speaker level people show up every week or so and broadcast the speeches company-wide.
There’s an organic garden in the center of the Googleplex, which I assume supplements the 14 on-campus, and completely free, organic-only ‘cafés’. Google doesn’t give its employees much reason to leave. The café’s are exactly like mini-Whole Food outlets with every type of cuisine that you can imagine. Employees could live off of sushi, 3 meals a day 7 days a week if they wanted to. We saw one group of Googlers ride along on an odd-looking 6-seater bike where everyone was facing each other; I don’t know how they turned it, but there was a wheel of some kind in the center that they were all holding on to. Maybe it was a team of engineers going from one building to another far away.
There are fully-stocked Odwalla juice dispensers and organic fruit in baskets in every building. The tea station doesn’t just have tea bags; they have hand wrapped organic tea. If someone had taken me from 1995 and zapped me to this place, I would have thought the year was 2100 and that the world was at peace. Other than one gray haired guy in a tie dye shirt, I don’t think I met anyone over the age of 35. The children are definitely ‘running the asylum’ at Google. It’s almost like some kind of a futuristic Marxist village that somehow actually worked. It was inspiring and yet a little scary at the same time.
