Los Gatos at dawn

Los Gatos, CA, is a beautiful little town. Mostly residential cottages and upscale and boutique shopping. Sort of reminds me of Carmel by the sea, but bigger...and not by the sea.

I stayed at the Los Gatos Hotel which also has an excellent Greek restaurant called Dia Deko and a spa. Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt apparently are regulars...although not at the same time unless they can first notify some paparazzi (in reference to their "coffee summit" of last weekend.)

Los Gatos is another place to add to my list called "Places I've been for business that I would love to re-visit with my wife but not for business."

Well Done, Los Gatians!

Google Perplexed

I flew in from Charlotte yesterday morning for a lunch meeting with an acquaintance at Google. Being a huge fan of Google (Don't Be Evil) for many reasons, I was very excited, to say the least, about setting foot on such "hallowed" ground.

I think it is safe to say I was impressed, but not overwhelmed to be there. I don't know if I had built up some kind of mythology about the place that was going to just wow me. I guess I was a little let down though but maybe my expectations were just too high.

It was a fun, vibrant, college-like atmosphere. I was there during lunchtime and young employees were bustling around. It was an overcast day so there was nobody on the volleyball court. I did see a few of the many fun objects d'art such as the dinosaur skeleton and shark fin. To be fair I also didn't actually go inside any of the offices, just one of the restaurants and we sat outdoors.

Don't get me wrong, I would still love to work there....and live in the south bay area. It's pretty nice, even with all the snails.

Garmin Edge 500 - Problem communicating with device

I got a brand new Edge 500 yesterday and went for my first ride today. Being very experienced with the Forerunner 305 I was looking forward to using this bike-centric upgrade.

I had a lot of trouble getting my files uploaded though. I normally use SportTracks but it doesn't seem to have support for the Edge 500 (as of 3/17/10.) So I tried GTC (Garmin Training Center.) Out of habit, I used the self-update check to see if there was a later version of GTC. It found a later version and installed itself. I was to find a problem with this later though.

First, I forgot I had to add the Edge 500 as another device so it took about an hour on/off to get to that point.

After you add it to your device profile you'll see this:



The next obstacle was that GTC failed to see the device. I tried using different USB ports, etc. I even connected my 305 and it popped up just fine. So after typing "Garmin Edge 500 - Problem communicating with device" into Google I found a post indicating that the GTC version might be the culprit.

Since I had already done the version upgrade I didn't think this was my issue. But I checked the version I had running anyway (Help, About) and to my surprise it was version 3.4.3. I know that I downloaded version 3.5.3 earlier.

Long story short, the software upgrade did not uninstall the previous version. I had to manually go to the program (program files, garmin, etc.) and created a desktop shortcut for the new version. After double-clicking that shortcut, I checked the version and got this:




Surprise surprise, my Edge 500 was found and my files were uploaded. Now I can get back to work on my training.