Best of 2011 in pictures

Looking at these pictures put a smile on my face, 2011 was a beautiful year:

winter forest

frozen view

muddy shoes

racing on ice

racing in mud

speed

snowing

b&w

faster

jump

downhill

critical mass

climbing

descending

we won

happy

the mud

more mud

too much mud

the church

the joy of finishing

let me go

faster

the picture of the year

beautiful finish line

the best view

finished

on the mountain

always higher

winter again

snow

one wheel

Song of the week #3

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Cyclepassion 2011

Last year in February I won a very cool calendar, the Cyclepassion 2011 calendar. Since then this calendar is hanging on my wall. Now that 2011 is over I wanted to write a post with all the pictures and all the links from the posts I wrote about this great gift.

The cover photo:

1. January - Willow Koerber 

Since I got the calendar only in February I don't have a post about this month but I'm posting the picture now:

2. February - Hanka Kupfernagel

3. March - Liz Hatch

4. April - Mona Eiberweiser

5. May - Veronica Andréasson

6. June - Willow Koerber and Heather Irmiger

7. July - Liz Hatch

8. August - Julie Krasniak

9. September - Heather Irmiger

10. October - Fabienne Heinzmann

11. November - Willow Koerber

12. December - Veronica Andréasson

Extra page 1:

Extra page 2 with all the girls - currently on my wall:

You can check out the new 2012 Cyclepassion calendar here.

Thanks again To Cyclepassion and light-bikes for this great calendar.

I won

This mornig I got a present :D

I won so many thing with my first triathlon race at the sea... This morning I got a Race Pack from nutricult.ro. I won this prize with the post I wrote after the race.

A lot of thanks to everybody who voted my story and some more thanks to Bogdan and Mihai :)

Song of the week #2

New year...

A new year, new statistics and new goals...

2011  was a good year, I managed to achieve some of my goals. After a near miss in spring where I got another 4th place finish I managed to get on the podium on my first marathon (80 km) after a grueling seven and a half hours.

In the summer I was at the sea where I finished in first place with my team on my first triathlon.

Stats for last year (about 3500 km, down from 5000 a year before and 4000 in 2009):

 - a few hundred kilometers on the trainer
 - a few hundred kilometers on the city bike
 - 1487 kilometers off-road, the clock is now at 7860

 - 1368 kilometers on the road, the clock is now at 5654 

I have only one goal for this year (involving a bike), to get as many kilometers on two wheels as possible and if it is possible I would like to win a medal :)

Chili con carne

As I said before I am trying to improve my recipe posts with pictures from the making of. One of my favorite foods, both to cook and to eat, is chili con carne. It is very easy to make this chili and it is very fast too.

The ingredients:

 - ground meat (I usually use mixed, pork and beef meat)

 - onion

 - garlic

 - carrots

 - red pepper

 - sweet corn

 - kidney beans

 - olive oil

 - tomato sauce

 - chili

 - salt & pepper, oregano, basil and bay leaves

For the topping I use sour cream, cheese and fresh onions.

 The first thing to do is to fry some onions in the olive oil. I used fresh carrots but it is faster if you cook the carrots separately in plain water.

Then you can add the meat, the salt and pepper, the garlic and the red peppers:

After the meat gets brown you can add the rest of the ingredients, first the tomato sauce to slow down the cooking:

Add the rest of the spices:

Then the corn and the beans:

While it cooks for about ten minutes you can prepare the toppings:

You can serve it without topping:

Or with the toppings which you like:

Bon appetit!

Song of the week #1

XAMPP, CodeIgniter and virtual hosts

This is a short tutorial for using CodeIgniter with XAMPP and setting up virtual hosts.

For developing web applications with php I use XAMPP wich is a free and easy to install Apache distribution containing MySQL, PHP and Perl. I used CakePHP for a few years but CodeIgniter is my favorite MVC php framework. 

It's very easy to install XAMPP, you just download it and than next-next-next. CodeIgniter is just the same, download, unzip and you are ready to go. The tricky part is to use virtual hosts. If you don't like to pile up all your projects in the XAMPP htdocs directory than you need to set up some virtual hosts.

I have dowloaded CodeIgniter and I've unzipped all the files to D:\temp\mydocs. To run the application I need to modify two files (XAMPP is installed on my C drive: C:\xampp\):

1. httpd-vhosts.conf from the apache (C:\xampp\apache\conf\extrahttpd-vhosts.conf)

after

NameVirtualHost *

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "C:\xampp\htdocs"

    ServerName localhost

  </VirtualHost>

add this:

  <VirtualHost *>

    DocumentRoot "d:\temp\mydocs"

    ServerName mydocs.local

    <Directory "D:\temp\mydocs">

      Order allow,deny

      Allow from all

    </Directory>

  </VirtualHost>

2. the host file from Windows (C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\hosts)

add this to the end of the file:

127.0.0.1       mydocs.local

After restarting apache I can run my project if I type http:// mydocs .local in my browser.

You can use whatever name you want for your projects (I like to use projectname.local), you only need to add the ServerName to your hosts file. You can store your project wherever you want, specify the location in the Directory.

Happy New Year 2012