Another Strava user in Lake Park, Internet crisis created and solved by AT&T

Zach Wolz at the Tropical Triathlon in Lake Worth (provided)

I am fascinated by the geekiness of cyclists and how data-obsessed the serious ones can be.

Enter Strava, a fitness app that is changing how cyclists ride. It allows cyclists to track their rides and compare their segments with earlier rides or against other cyclists.

"I heard about it through some friends who were using it, and saw some ads for it on TV," says Zach Wolz of the OYM Performance Bicycle Shop in Lake Park.

Wolz rides in a pelaton in the Treasure Coast
Cycling Race (provided).

He tracks some of his rides and certain courses using the Strava app on his iPhone, tucked in his back pocket.

Wolz almost has a KOM, tech talk for King of the Mountain, for the trash mountain in Dyer Park, a Palm Beach County Park in suburban West Palm Beach and for the Donald Ross Bridge in Juno Beach.

The KOM designation is a bragging right provided by Strava to let its users oust the KOM if they have a better riding time for that particular segment. Think of it as Foursquare and its mayor designation but with real-world bragging rights because of the competition involved.

As many of his cycling buddies, he has more than bike. He owns three: a road bike, a time-trial bike and a mountain bike.

Why so late?

If you're wondering why I am posting a few days late this week, I will just say: AT&T. 

I was lured into their world of U-verse by a letter that said they were switching all of their DSL (digital subscriber line) subscribers to its U-verse system that uses fiber-optic technology. And that if I acted now, I could get super-fast Internet access for only $19.99 a month until the end of the year. I fell for that low-cost deal in late March.

Last Friday (April 5), an AT&T tech showed up at my house about 10 a.m., saying he had just cut off my DSL access, but not to worry, I would have a U-verse modem that afternoon. 

The modem never came. I entered the parallel universe of life without Internet access but having to spend most of that extra time on the phone with AT&T customer care reps and the shipper, UPS. The package had a bad address on it.

I tweeted about my lack of Internet access on Monday and Tuesday (April 8 and 9), and also wrote Facebook status updates about it.

Then late Tuesday afternoon (April 9), when I realized that I and the AT&T customer care reps had been reading the UPS tracking record the wrong way -- thanks to Myra at UPS for pointing out that my modem was sent back to AT&T -- I became more mad than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs.

As a result, an AT&T tech named Artie came to my house Wednesday (April 10) afternoon and installed my U-verse modem at no cost to me. Thanks to Supervisor Jackie in Central Texas for making that happen. And I am getting a $5 credit for each day I was without Internet access. 

So how is my U-verse system working? I love the super-fast speeds that U-verse gives me for Internet browsing, especially when it comes to photos.

And now, for my numbers

I had my best walking day last week on Saturday, April 6, 2013, when I walked:

Steps: 10,646

Miles: 5.3