Check out the Lucky Brake Bike Shop. Formerly known as the Village Pedaler in Crystal Lake, the manager, and good friend of mine, Karrie Ozyuk, bought the business from her boss. If you're in the Crystal Lake area and are looking to buy a bike, get serviced, or need a fit, this is definately the place to go. Tell them that Jesse sent you.

I had a great time at Hillsboro, I think I learned some more of what not to do in a race. The race started off really well, I was the 10th wheel for the first half of the race, a prime position. Some guy had broken off the front, but the peloton was really lazy, as if nobody wanted to do any work. I got out in front and pulled hard, and split the field into three groups. I pulled over for someone to replace me, but nobody did. Then as we went around a corner, one guy crashed, and I had to hit my brakes, and hammer to get back to the pack. Unfortunately the timing was wron and I wasn't able to catch up. By this time I was feeling dehydrated, and was starting to cramp up. I got a nice break when the Pro/1/2 lead vehicle passed me, and what I thought was two of the P/1/2 packs passed. As they passed me I saw too many hairy legs for them not to be the cat 5 field, so I hopped back on.

I was able to hold on to them, and attack at a climb. One guy really took off even though he looked like more of a sprinter than a climber. I was second in the group, and had the third right on my tail. I shook him off, and hammered hard into the finish line to keep my lead, and finish 18 out of 48 starters. Not too bad for the mistakes I made. Better luck next time.

"The problem was an O(n^2) linked list traversal during the finalization step of the transaction commit. For a large object, there can be 100,000 entries in the linked list and this was taking up to 30 minutes to traverse. Switching to an O(n) traversal brought it down to 15ms."