There are two ways you can get exercise out of a bicycle: you can “overhaul” it, or you can ride it. On the whole, I am not sure that a man who takes his pleasure overhauling does not have the best of the bargain. He is independent of the weather and the wind; the state of the roads troubles him not. Give him a screw-hammer, a bundle of rags, an oil-can, and something to sit down upon, and he is happy for the day. He has to put up with certain disadvantages, of course; there is no joy without alloy. He himself always looks like a tinker, and his machine always suggests the idea that, having stolen it, he has tried to disguise it; but as he rarely gets beyond the first milestone with it, this, perhaps, does not much matter. The mistake some people make is in thinking they can get both forms of sport out of the same machine. This is impossible; no machine will stand the double strain. You must make up your mind whether you are going to be an “overhauler” or a rider.
Personally, I prefer to ride, therefore I take care to have near me nothing that can tempt me to overhaul. When anything happens to my machine I wheel it to the nearest repairing shop. If I am too far from the town or village to walk, I sit by the roadside and wait till a cart comes along.
My chief danger, I always find, is from the wandering overhauler. The sight of a broken-down machine is to the overhauler as a wayside corpse to a crow; he swoops down upon it with a friendly yell of triumph. At first I used to try politeness. I would say:
“It is nothing; don’t you trouble. You ride on, and enjoy yourself, I beg it of you as a favour; please go away.”
Experience has taught me, however, that courtesy is of no use in such an extremity.
Now I say:
“You go away and leave the thing alone, or I will knock your silly head off.”
This is exactly why I switched my sport of choice from cycling to running. In cycling, I kept getting pulled into the gear and tinkering. (It didn't help that I raced cyclocross, so during race season, every Monday was spent cleaning and repairing the result of the previous day's races). TBH, it was fun, but if I spent as much time training as I did tinkering, maybe I would have had some decent race results.
With running, it's harder to believe that the gear is what's holding me back from performance. Get a rotation of shoes, and that's pretty much it. My shorts and tops probably need to be replaced at this point before their growing transparency scandalizes the neighborhood, but as long as they're light and sweat-wicking, it doesn't matter too much what I replace them with.
But then I made the mistake of getting into rock climbing...
I always enjoyed running becasue I could be ready in like 2 minutes vs going for a bike ride that involved at a minimum kitting up, pumping the tires, and more often than that for the type of riding I like (cross/mtb) I'd also have to drive to a destination. Now I can't run due to injury/surgery, so I have a bike on the trainer now and that's my tv time. minimizes the bike futzing.
That's part of the reason I love running too. A minimum of fuss. It's funny that you mention rock climbing, because it's the same reason I love bouldering. You only need shoes. Climbing has something for everyone - trad for the gear heads, bouldering for the people who can't be bothered with planning, sport for people somewhere in the middle.
i just decided that i enjoy working on bikes more than i do riding them and i decided that was fine. What i dislike the most is talking to people on reddit about it. if i need a new part that i dont know where to find google will lead me to the forum that will lead me t owhat i need. if i can't find it i can ask on reddit. but i do not want to sit around on forums talking about bikes. what a waste of time. and look at me, im sitting around in a forum talking about bikes. i'll see myself out.
For rock climbing, stick to bouldering. All you need for bouldering is shoes. The situations where even a chalk bag is required are very particular outliers, as are situations where gloves would be a consideration. You could spend plenty of money on shoes of course, same as running, but once you find comfy ones you tend to invest in them over and over again. Like running, it really does come down perseverance - I do think there’s a creativity I didn’t expect in bouldering.
This is one thing I appreciate about swimming. I don’t own the pool, so no fiddling there. My swim trunks require no fiddling. The only thing that could possibly require fiddling are my goggles, but I use Swedish goggles that are so simple (two pieces of plastic and a piece of rubber - there isn’t even a gasket), they don’t require any fiddling.
But rock climbing doesn't have the gear heads of other hobbies - at least, I've never encountered these. There are definitely people that enjoy the technical aspects of how to best secure yourself with your gear, what knots to use and so on, but otherwise I haven't had many of these discussions.
On that aspect, rock climbing and especially bouldering are very similar to running. Don't get me started on trail running, though...
Isn't it marvellous to simplify. Remove all 'things'.
I feel it in playing guitar, I often only play the most simple of setups (acoustic guitar) as it gets the the root of my itch without distraction, blame or gear desire.
As a guitar player, this really resonates. I now spend almost all my time with my unadorned acoustic, leaving behind the tinkerhole
of my electric guitar and its effects pedals, looper, amp etc.
Mmm this right here is why for the last two years I've been using Jetbrains IDE and Obsidian as my daily drivers, because my Emacs config isn't _quite_ right and if only I could have a shortcut to tile the buffers according to the golden ratio... but first why isn't the font-face-mode applying to magit... Hey wait, this elisp to convert org-mode to markdown is failing but only in this directory...
You can't possibly be old enough to have met him in person, so I consider you impertinent in using the author's given name. Have a bit of respect and use his last name!
Beautiful! Thanks for sharing this. The word "bummel" (a German word for "stroll") is described wonderfully in the last paragraph of the book, it is quoted here[1].
A modern day example of the above "overhauler" way (a theme familiar to HN): we see many variants of "Look! I've setup the perfect static website!" Then the person goes on to write a single, lonely post on "how to setup a perfect static site", and then ... go silent for 5 years, or forever. They've burnt too much energy in "configuring".
I have been roasted before on the internet for suggesting that bleeding disc brakes was inconvenient. I think this distinction between riders and overhaulers actually explains a lot!
I started off in the "enjoying collecting gear" quadrant of photography, then I heard an insightful comment by a pro: "If you have $5K, you can either buy one good lens and use it to take photos of the pigeons outside your apartment, or spend that money on a destination holiday and take pictures of amazingly beautiful places with your old lens which still works perfectly fine."
I stopped buying new kit and started going on lots of holidays. No regrets so far. I just wish I had the budget for a Nikon Z9 and a holiday, but I don't work in Silicon Valley, so...
Somewhat similar, but within a few years of starting photography I had a DSLR and 4-5 lenses. I was also taking lots of pictures but overtime the allure of the big gear wore off as I realized I didn't want to carry it around anymore. Eventually I downsized to a Fujifilm X100F and its been a wonderful experience!
That Z9 will be yesterdays tech in a year or two, and you'll be able to pick it up for a fraction of its current price. It'll still perform exactly as well as it does today, but the gear heads will be onto the next new thing.
It probably won't see significant price drops for 5+ years, because the pace of development in the DSLR market is slowing down. There are longer and longer gaps between new significant features, which means the price of used cameras isn't going down as fast as they used to.
That advice surprises me. It's quite possible to go to the most amazingly beautiful place on earth and still take pigeon-dull photos, with or without a fancy camera. I've done it myself. Surely what matters is learning how to see, and to depict?
Oh, and working in Silicon Valley may not be necessary. A non-techy friend of mine bought a medium format camera and took it to Antarctica. But then he is a cardiologist.
Some of the best photos I've taken in my ~12 years as a hobbyist photographer have been less than 30 minutes from home. Despite all the holidays I've been on.
As an ex pro photographer (not great as I am an ex!) but the best camera is the one easy to access and use. While my photos don't have the three dimensional quality they used to have, they are in the moment and captured by doing rather than doing photography.
iPhone Camera. Incredible.
What really rebooted my photography is buying a high quality (well not even all that high, a used Pixma Pro 200) photo printer. There is something special about holding pictures printed on quality paper. They make great gifts (well if they are good!) They look different than on a screen.
I print (good) iphone photos without any retouching or correcting on photo 4x6 and they look great! Doing this without fiddling in lightroom is the closest I've gotten to the experience of film photography but with digital.
It's well known in the reading community that "reading" and "talking about the books you want to read" and "buying and owning books" are all very different things; I guess the missing piece would be "talking about the books you've bought and now own" which is sharing pictures of "shelfies" etc. I'm not really into the last one but the first three are all very enjoyable to me, in very different ways, although I only really enjoy buying physical copies of nonfiction books; for fiction I tend to just go for ebooks.
I've always found the discussion and community around a hobby can be as important as the hobby itself. There's lots of books I like but can't talk to anyone familiar enough to care.
It seems like there's some overlap with the Bartle types from online gaming. You tend to have 4 main motivations to play an massively-multiplayer online game: there's the explorers, the achievers, the socializers, and the killers.
Most hobbies don't literally have a "killer" group (I hope), but maybe the real-world analogous thing is people who enjoy telling other people they suck at their hobby. The other groups seem to apply. You have the people who want to know everything about the hobby, the people who want to be the best at that hobby, and the people who like interacting with that hobby's community. (And just like in online games, too many "killers" can ruin the fun that the socializers are there for. We all know communities that fell apart because they were overrun by snobs and trolls.)
This is something that's been debated over the years, but I think Bartle missed a fifth type, which is people who want to create. In online gaming, these could be the people who actually programmed the game in the first place, or it could be players who are very into user generated content (especially in games like Minecraft where that's a big part of the game).
Similarly there are people who are into gear to the point where they're building their own gear, or even designing original equipment.
I'm that way with music. I'm not very good at guitar or piano or any other instrument and I don't know how to compose, but I got into microtonalism and just intonation, and since proper instruments for that don't really exist (save for continuous-pitch instruments like violin), I've been adapting guitars for a variety of different tunings and building electronic instruments. When you think about it it's pretty weird that I'm learning Kicad and PCB layout because the major third on a 12-EDO instrument is out of tune by about fifteen cents (because the 12th root of 2 to the 4th power is a very crude approximation of 5/4), but sometimes that's just how it goes.
I’ve found some of the most useful people on forums like StackOverflow, have very little experience actually shipping product.
They are often my “go to” people, for things like the correct way to do stuff, or for rabbithole exploration of technology/technique, but it comes more from a place of theory, than it does, from practical application.
This is not always a bad thing. In fact, it can be a very good thing.
I’m very much a “get the job done” type of chap. I get my hands dirty, and regularly get stuff out, and into the world.
But I don’t give myself a lot of time to learn esoteric theory or optimization. I do the thing, but maybe not as well as it could be done, or as effectively.
That’s why I appreciate some of these folks that spend all their time, exploring the whys of the techn[ology|ique]. I’ll buy their books, take their classes, or read their posts, and apply the fruits of their work to mine. One of the authors I respect the most for his amazing knowledge of the depths of Apple tech, had, the last time I checked, just one, rather silly, app on the App Store; but he’s written multiple books, and been a major presence at a lot of conferences.
There’s also a lot to be said for effective communicators. Knowing stuff can be worthless, if there’s no way to transmit the information. Writing books is really difficult. Writing books that people want to read, even more so.
Being a good speaker is also a valuable skill. There are folks with minimal expertise, that I can listen to for hours, and people that really know their stuff, that are great soporifics.
If someone can explain something to me, quickly and clearly, so I “get it,” then that person is valuable to me.
In turn, someone like me, can take their theory, and turn it into a real “thing”; handling all the repetitive, “boring” stuff that is required to get it out the door.
There’s a lot of looking down of noses, between “doers,” “talkers,” and “thinkers,” but I’ve found it’s best to have respect for each other, and combine our strengths.
> There’s a lot of looking down of noses, between “doers,” “talkers,” and “thinkers,” but I’ve found it’s best to have respect for each other, and combine our strengths.
Nicely said. While “those who can, do; those who can’t teach” is funny, it’s usually so, so wrong.
>While “those who can, do; those who can’t teach” is funny, it’s usually so, so wrong.
Right? I have found that teaching is a skill like anything else and is usually orthogonal to whatever skill is under discussion. It'd be like saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, bake."
I think a more useful saying would be "Don't assume that just because someone can DO it, that they can TEACH it." i.e. Engineering professors :-(
I know a lot of guys who love fishing and can't seem to understand why I don't. When I was younger, I geared up and fished quite a bit. Once I became successful at the sport I began to realize I wasn't having as much fun as everybody was telling me I should have been having because I was actually catching fish.
Then it dawned on me, what joy I initially had when I started fishing had run it's course. So, I moved on and was relieved of almost forcing myself to have fun at fishing. My hobby thrill now is computers and electronics. After many years I still am having fun and don't see any changes in future, but who knows?
Maybe it's because I was never very good at it (I went perhaps a dozen times) but that's why I enjoyed fly fishing.
The fun for me was picking some place in the river (theoretically one that I thought might contain a fish) and trying to get the fly there. That was tricky enough for me to provide a lazy days entertainment. I might even catch a fish.
Totally resonate with this. I'm still in love with fishing, but it's like once you've caught a 10lbs bass, bass fishing doesn't feel that interesting anymore. It's weird but fair to think that one day I may no longer enjoy fishing.
This is the same for me. I have realised that once I begin drifting into the gear + talking parts of a hobby, my interest in the doing parts of the hobby are waning, and I'll probably stop enjoying it shortly. I can either take a break, or continue pursuing the novelty of the hobby through acquisition of the gear; but this is actually a very stressful way to interact with a hobby.
It's a cycle though and after a break I come back to enjoying the doing parts. I have a bunch of hobbies that circle around in various levels of "doing decay".
this is me but for magic the gathering and dungeons and dragons. it used to be fun but now it is not. and i sat wondering why it wasn't fun for years until i decided i don't even need to know WHY i just needed to accept that it was true and find other things to do.
I feel like this is me spinning in circles deciding on “the best language” to use for a side project, never committing, and then inevitably losing momentum.
Frameworks and languages are a software engineer’s “kit”, I guess?
I think so, but even things like focusing too much on a perfect design or well-tested system can bog you down on a side project if you actually want to finish it.
I know for me I used to spend way too much time trying to organize my code and folders just right. If I learned a new design technique, I'd incorporate it into the project. I was obsessed with doing things right, which I think is fine if my goal was to learn, which it partly was. However, I also wanted to ship!
Over time I relaxed my requirements on perfect design and testing and was able to ship things.
I agree with this 100%, every time i've wanted to get into a new tech stack I start a new side project more-or-less as a thinly veiled reason to learn it and hit my head on real world roadblocks within it. If nothing else you can learn beforehand that you'd never want to use it as a daily driver and drift on to the next big thing.
This is the way. A combination of the two would be prototyping in the language you know best (b), and then once you have it working rewriting it in (a). That way you’re only dealing with one novel thing at a time.
For me that’s Python (b) and any shiny object (a), respectively.
This is why you should about companies touting their choice of an exotic language as a perk. Rather than hiring people who want to build a product, they hire people who bikeshed language debates.
When I was a kid, I was super into programming languages. Read all about the different kinds, learned about Haskell, self-modifying code, dependent typing, and of course I wanted to design my own language. Now I just want whatever breaks the least and let’s me get the job done.
It’s funny because my family always used to ask why I went into engineering instead of computer science, and I said it was because as soon as programming became a job, it would suck the fun out of it. Well I veered away from engineering into data science, and sure enough, I don’t seem to get quite the same joy out of coding that I did when I was younger.
Now that I think about it I get zero pleasure from buying cycling gear. The best bike is one that is light and functional enough that it kind of disappears out from under me and I don’t have to think about it, just enjoy the scenery. So I’m all about doing the thing.
On the otherhand I love tinkering with motorcycles. Not buying gear so much but researching and restoring them in my shop. Maybe its that engines are so much more technical or maybe its the slight spectre of death or serious bodily injury that keeps me from enjoying riding them as much. But I always feel a little disappointed when its all fixed and back together.
Readit News
Personally, I prefer to ride, therefore I take care to have near me nothing that can tempt me to overhaul. When anything happens to my machine I wheel it to the nearest repairing shop. If I am too far from the town or village to walk, I sit by the roadside and wait till a cart comes along.
My chief danger, I always find, is from the wandering overhauler. The sight of a broken-down machine is to the overhauler as a wayside corpse to a crow; he swoops down upon it with a friendly yell of triumph. At first I used to try politeness. I would say: “It is nothing; don’t you trouble. You ride on, and enjoy yourself, I beg it of you as a favour; please go away.”
Experience has taught me, however, that courtesy is of no use in such an extremity.
Now I say: “You go away and leave the thing alone, or I will knock your silly head off.”
“three men on the bummel”, 1914
With running, it's harder to believe that the gear is what's holding me back from performance. Get a rotation of shoes, and that's pretty much it. My shorts and tops probably need to be replaced at this point before their growing transparency scandalizes the neighborhood, but as long as they're light and sweat-wicking, it doesn't matter too much what I replace them with.
But then I made the mistake of getting into rock climbing...
I always enjoyed running becasue I could be ready in like 2 minutes vs going for a bike ride that involved at a minimum kitting up, pumping the tires, and more often than that for the type of riding I like (cross/mtb) I'd also have to drive to a destination. Now I can't run due to injury/surgery, so I have a bike on the trainer now and that's my tv time. minimizes the bike futzing.
Running reminds me of strength training. No one thinks a new barbell is going to add 10% to their one-rep max.
On that aspect, rock climbing and especially bouldering are very similar to running. Don't get me started on trail running, though...
Jerome Klapka Jerome (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_K._Jerome) is one of my favourite authors. For those folks unfamiliar with his works Project Gutenberg is a great resource https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/173 Start with "Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow" and go from there.
Just make sure that you are not eating/drinking while reading his books and have somebody monitoring you in case you collapse from pure laughter :-)
I've known of "Three Men In A Boat" since childhood and it never occurred to me to ask what his middle name was, or that it might be this surprising.
A modern day example of the above "overhauler" way (a theme familiar to HN): we see many variants of "Look! I've setup the perfect static website!" Then the person goes on to write a single, lonely post on "how to setup a perfect static site", and then ... go silent for 5 years, or forever. They've burnt too much energy in "configuring".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Men_on_the_Bummel#The_wo...
but i too have this “solution”
It is a very funny book that also predicted the rise of Hitler.
There is an accident that happens early on in the book that my dad replicated over 100 years later in exactly the same way.
I stopped buying new kit and started going on lots of holidays. No regrets so far. I just wish I had the budget for a Nikon Z9 and a holiday, but I don't work in Silicon Valley, so...
It probably won't see significant price drops for 5+ years, because the pace of development in the DSLR market is slowing down. There are longer and longer gaps between new significant features, which means the price of used cameras isn't going down as fast as they used to.
I've never bought flagship gear, and I often buy second hand. This is the way.
Oh, and working in Silicon Valley may not be necessary. A non-techy friend of mine bought a medium format camera and took it to Antarctica. But then he is a cardiologist.
I print (good) iphone photos without any retouching or correcting on photo 4x6 and they look great! Doing this without fiddling in lightroom is the closest I've gotten to the experience of film photography but with digital.
Deleted Comment
Most hobbies don't literally have a "killer" group (I hope), but maybe the real-world analogous thing is people who enjoy telling other people they suck at their hobby. The other groups seem to apply. You have the people who want to know everything about the hobby, the people who want to be the best at that hobby, and the people who like interacting with that hobby's community. (And just like in online games, too many "killers" can ruin the fun that the socializers are there for. We all know communities that fell apart because they were overrun by snobs and trolls.)
This is something that's been debated over the years, but I think Bartle missed a fifth type, which is people who want to create. In online gaming, these could be the people who actually programmed the game in the first place, or it could be players who are very into user generated content (especially in games like Minecraft where that's a big part of the game).
Similarly there are people who are into gear to the point where they're building their own gear, or even designing original equipment.
I'm that way with music. I'm not very good at guitar or piano or any other instrument and I don't know how to compose, but I got into microtonalism and just intonation, and since proper instruments for that don't really exist (save for continuous-pitch instruments like violin), I've been adapting guitars for a variety of different tunings and building electronic instruments. When you think about it it's pretty weird that I'm learning Kicad and PCB layout because the major third on a 12-EDO instrument is out of tune by about fifteen cents (because the 12th root of 2 to the 4th power is a very crude approximation of 5/4), but sometimes that's just how it goes.
They are often my “go to” people, for things like the correct way to do stuff, or for rabbithole exploration of technology/technique, but it comes more from a place of theory, than it does, from practical application.
This is not always a bad thing. In fact, it can be a very good thing.
I’m very much a “get the job done” type of chap. I get my hands dirty, and regularly get stuff out, and into the world.
But I don’t give myself a lot of time to learn esoteric theory or optimization. I do the thing, but maybe not as well as it could be done, or as effectively.
That’s why I appreciate some of these folks that spend all their time, exploring the whys of the techn[ology|ique]. I’ll buy their books, take their classes, or read their posts, and apply the fruits of their work to mine. One of the authors I respect the most for his amazing knowledge of the depths of Apple tech, had, the last time I checked, just one, rather silly, app on the App Store; but he’s written multiple books, and been a major presence at a lot of conferences.
There’s also a lot to be said for effective communicators. Knowing stuff can be worthless, if there’s no way to transmit the information. Writing books is really difficult. Writing books that people want to read, even more so.
Being a good speaker is also a valuable skill. There are folks with minimal expertise, that I can listen to for hours, and people that really know their stuff, that are great soporifics.
If someone can explain something to me, quickly and clearly, so I “get it,” then that person is valuable to me.
In turn, someone like me, can take their theory, and turn it into a real “thing”; handling all the repetitive, “boring” stuff that is required to get it out the door.
There’s a lot of looking down of noses, between “doers,” “talkers,” and “thinkers,” but I’ve found it’s best to have respect for each other, and combine our strengths.
Nicely said. While “those who can, do; those who can’t teach” is funny, it’s usually so, so wrong.
Right? I have found that teaching is a skill like anything else and is usually orthogonal to whatever skill is under discussion. It'd be like saying "Those who can, do. Those who can't, bake."
I think a more useful saying would be "Don't assume that just because someone can DO it, that they can TEACH it." i.e. Engineering professors :-(
Then it dawned on me, what joy I initially had when I started fishing had run it's course. So, I moved on and was relieved of almost forcing myself to have fun at fishing. My hobby thrill now is computers and electronics. After many years I still am having fun and don't see any changes in future, but who knows?
The fun for me was picking some place in the river (theoretically one that I thought might contain a fish) and trying to get the fly there. That was tricky enough for me to provide a lazy days entertainment. I might even catch a fish.
It's a cycle though and after a break I come back to enjoying the doing parts. I have a bunch of hobbies that circle around in various levels of "doing decay".
Frameworks and languages are a software engineer’s “kit”, I guess?
I know for me I used to spend way too much time trying to organize my code and folders just right. If I learned a new design technique, I'd incorporate it into the project. I was obsessed with doing things right, which I think is fine if my goal was to learn, which it partly was. However, I also wanted to ship!
Over time I relaxed my requirements on perfect design and testing and was able to ship things.
a) the language you want to learn, the side project is a means towards this end
or
b) the language you know best, you want the side project to actually be good
For me that’s Python (b) and any shiny object (a), respectively.
Choose Java and move on with your life.
It’s funny because my family always used to ask why I went into engineering instead of computer science, and I said it was because as soon as programming became a job, it would suck the fun out of it. Well I veered away from engineering into data science, and sure enough, I don’t seem to get quite the same joy out of coding that I did when I was younger.
On the otherhand I love tinkering with motorcycles. Not buying gear so much but researching and restoring them in my shop. Maybe its that engines are so much more technical or maybe its the slight spectre of death or serious bodily injury that keeps me from enjoying riding them as much. But I always feel a little disappointed when its all fixed and back together.