Saturday, September 12, 2009

Cycle Oregon Day 0

I arrived in Medford today for the start of Cycle Oregon. Dinner was prime rib steak (no I'm not kidding). It was really nice to see my old elementary school again, which has changed very little. The evening's entertainment was a be-bop jazz band that played foor over an hour: it was easy to see that most folks were not interested, although I found it a good distraction. Tomorrow is a big day. I am uncharacteristicly excited, like a kid on Christmas Eve. I sure hope I can sleep tonight.

Monday, September 7, 2009

CO 2009 Reading List

I have finalized my reading list for Cycle Oregon 2009. Here it is divided up into sections. There are a lot of titles because I may have a lot of time to myself. We’ll see how much of this I actually get through!

Fiction:

The Archimedes Effect by Tom Clancy (Amazon)

Non-Fiction:

A Brief History of Time (Illustrated, Updated, & Expanded 1996 Edition) by Stephen Hawking (Amazon)

Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem by Simon Singh (Amazon)

Religious:

The Book of Mormon, Pocket Size (LDSCatalog.org)

True to the Faith: A Gospel Reference (LDSCatalog.org)

I debated whether or not to bring my entire scriptures set but my bag has to weigh in at less than 65 lbs, which includes my sleeping bag, clothes, extra bike parts, etc. With this in mind I decided to limit my scriptures to only the pocket sized Book of Mormon and the True to the Faith book. These should keep me busy each morning.

The non-fiction books are quite deep. The Hawking book was a birthday gift a few years back received during my college days. I had no time to read it or any of the other book gifts that people have given me. I was so busy reading for class that other books have suffered until class ended in March of this year. I have quite a collection of back-reading to do. The Singh book was a recommendation by my Cryptography professor after he had us read another of Singh’s books for class, The Code Book, a fascinating book about the history of modern cryptography.

The Clancy book is escapist literature at its finest, at least as far as I am concerned. It’s pretty light weight and I really like Clancy’s style, even though he didn’t technically write this book.

Only 6 more days to go! (I actually leave in 4 days on a Friday but the ride starts on a Sunday) My next post will be about the technology aspects of my ride.