Freezing Saddles Pointless Prizes

[ShawnoftheDread]

Holy Moly, Arlingtonrider is the QUEEN OF HAINS POINT.

[vvill]

@hozn 44642 wrote:

Thanks, vvill.

So, does this top-X look about right (I just grabbed the top few)?

Looks right to me – it matches my data (if you view the segment on Strava => My Results => filter by “This Year”).

[Amalitza]

For anyone who hasn’t already bookmarked it , I edited the first post of this thread with the link to Hans’ site.

[hozn]

BTW, I’ve applied some more changes to the site to make the various team leaderboards match up with individual. I added Hains Point laps for both team & individual (though I understand the prize is just for individual).

I’m going to consult the google docs file to see if there are some other easy ones I can add this evening. Otherwise I’m gonna start working on pulling down weather data.

[vvill]

Looking forward to seeing weather data!

Just one small thing I noticed – the mouseover titles for the individual leaderboard graph bars are mislabeled as “Elevation”.

[rcannon100]

I would like to nominate this ride as a “Most Suspicious Ride” nominee.

[hozn]

@vvill 44845 wrote:

Looking forward to seeing weather data!

Just one small thing I noticed – the mouseover titles for the individual leaderboard graph bars are mislabeled as “Elevation”.

(Thanks for catching that! I fixed the mouse-over label earlier last week. I added a new bubble chart on the “Explore” tab too.)

I have been working on weather which has proven more troublesome than I expected. I’m trying to use the NCDC APIs because they’re free & not rate-limited, but they’re not as straightforward as wunderground. (I may use wunderground to supplement where NCDC doesn’t turn up any data [for the dataset I’m using].) I let it churn on data last night for awhile on my local copy; I haven’t evaluated the results, but I should not have:
– *daily* min & max temperatures for every ride with a start lat/lon
– *daily* precipitation measures (and snow) for every ride with a start lat/lon

It looks like there are a couple/few hundred rides in the system (out of a few thousand) that do not have any geographic data (I assume manually entered?). I will look more deeply at these later, but I may just default those to a “DC area weather station” (e.g. National Airport).

It also looks like there are a few ride locations where NCDC doesn’t have any ground-station data within 25km. I’ll probably broaden the radius, with the risk that weather gets less accurate. (This is where I may supplement with wunderground too.)

Once I complete this initial exercise I plan to add:
– sunrise/sunset for each ride (yes, not all the rides are local, so we kinda need to calculate it per ride to be correct). I have a library to calculate that, but it also requires that I determine the time zone for each ride. Luckly I also found a library to take lat/lon and find the timezone that contains those coordinates.
– For more useful temperatures, I will look up the previous and next days’ max/min temperatures and then use a diurnal temperature model to estimate the temperature at the start of the ride.

So, in the end we should be able to talk about rides that start/end before sunrise/sunset and talk about the temperatures at start/end of rides. I am not pulling down the entire ride gps data currently, so there’s no way to say exactly how long someone was riding in the dark or in temps below freezing, etc. (Although we might be able to do some basic math to guess at this.) One thing that definitely throws stuff off is that some people keep their computer running between their morning & evening commutes — or other multiple trips.

Anyway, just wanted to provide an update; I know a couple people are wanting to run weather queries. I’m finding myself a little limited by the availability of good data, but plan to have something out there this week so people can start querying it.

[KelOnWheels]

If we can get the weather data, a “Hot Stuff” prize for the freezingest saddler would be fun

And of course something for the person with the most warm weather rides (“Ice Cube Down the Neck” award?)

[Amalitza]

Only two weeks until spring!

1) YAY, SPRING! (It will immediately become warm and pleasant on Day 1 of spring, right? Right?!)

2) This is the current status of pointless prizes The following prizes have someone who has offered to award them. I am unsure if anyone has sent nominations to SteveO and Dickie for the Ride Title and Dirt-y Moustache awards; if not, those prizes may not have a winner. There are one or two others that I will probably go ahead and put together, also.

First Place Team– rcannon
Best Ride Titles in various categories– Steve O
Least Freezing Freezing Saddle Ride— acl
Midnight Madness– DCAKen
Dirt-y Moustache– Dickie
Last Place Team– eminva
Team with most Hains Pt laps– eminva
Nooner/ Lunch Hour Hero– KayakCyndi

3) Additionally, the following items are either already being tracked on hozn’s leaderboard, or PeteD has offered to do the data mining on them. Plus, hozn is now working on pulling in weather data, as well, I believe.

Team with most sleaze days
Individual with most sleaze days
Individual Hains Pt laps
Team elevation gain
Team time in saddle
Team average speed
individual elevation gain
Individual time in saddle
Individual average speed
Coldest ride.
Weekender:

Tim has offered a few items of Bike Arlington swag (thanks Tim!) that can be put towards some of the categories above, but right now we are getting way more categories with cool data than we have people awarding prizes. And there are also plenty of other awards that have been suggested but no one has offered to put together. So if anyone else is thinking of volunteering to award a pointless prize, please speak up soon– we are actually getting close to the end of winter and the competition.

4) Speaking of getting close to the end, is anyone thinking of putting together the happy hour where the drinking of the beer and the awarding of the prizes will occur?

[eminva]

I can do individual Hains Point laps, too. So all you who were thinking of challenging Arlingtonrider, go for it. It is going to be an AWESOME prize.

I can do others, but I’ll see what gets spoken for and then pick from the leftovers.

I thought we were going to do the awards/happy hour at the Phoenix Bikes thing?

Thanks, acl, for posting this.

Liz

[Arlingtonrider]

Arghhhhhh!!!!!

Correction: ARGHHHHHH!!!!! 😮

(just kidding! )

[rcannon100]

@eminva 45332 wrote:

I thought we were going to do the awards/happy hour at the Phoenix Bikes thing?

First place will be awarded during the Phoenix Bike Show March 21 in Crystal City.

The proposal is that we have a happy hour before hand to award the rest of the pointless awards. Tim says that Hamburger Hamlet is a local joint that has accommodated cyclists before.

We need someone to step forward and organize the happy hour on March 21 in Crystal City prior to the bike show.

[Arlingtonrider]

Does anyone here know anything about what the possible Crystal City venues are like and the bike and car parking situations?

I’ve never gone anywhere in Crystal City except to Good Stuff and once to some other place that closed. I usually lock to a park bench, but I think there are a few racks.

[Arlingtonrider]

We need to plan a party, so I’ll try to help. I’m looking for a volunteer (or two or three?) who might like to go for a quick pub hop in Crystal City with me Sunday afternoon or Tuesday evening to check out 2 or 3 possible venues for the Freezing Saddles awards. So far, Hamburger Hamlet and the Sports Pub have been suggested. Any other places there where beer might be sampled?

(Also, it would be very helpful to know appx. how many people plan to come to the pointless prizes happy hour. I’m assuming this would be open to non-freezing saddle people as well.)

RCannon100 suggested the awards happy hour be held on Thursday, March 21, just before the annual Phoenix Bikes Show, where first prize would be awarded. The Phoenix Bike Show is 7-9 p.m. at 251 S. 18th Street in Crystal City and tickets are $25 in advance or $30 at the door (all for a good cause). See http://www.phoenixbikes.org.

[jopamora]

@Arlingtonrider 45352 wrote:

Does anyone here know anything about what the possible Crystal City venues are like and the bike and car parking situations?

I’ve never gone anywhere in Crystal City except to Good Stuff and once to some other place that closed. I usually lock to a park bench, but I think there are a few racks.

Not sure if I’ll make it, but since I work in Crystal City here are a few places on Crystal Drive.

Bailey’s – Lots of beer, food is ok
BW3 – Ok selection of beer, food is ok
Kora – Large bar area, 3-4 taps, usually one tap is something great and they have good food
Jaleo – Not sure about the beer on draft, but the food is good

[Author]

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