• Video: AMTBC Dirt Crit 1 MTB Race

    On Thursday I entered my first MTB race. This race was the 2009/2010 AMTBC Summer Series ‘Dirt Crit’ No. 1.  A ‘dirt crit’ is similar to a regular road crit or criterium in that the course is very short, but it differs in that the course is mostly dirt, hence ‘dirt crit’.  The race format sets a fixed amount of racing time for each race grade plus one finishing lap after the allotted time has elapsed.

    This being my first race, I wasn’t quite sure which class/grade to enter. The grade system for this race was A through E, A being fast/elite and E being something like slow/recreational.  The E grade raced 15 minutes plus one lap, and each successive grade added five minutes; the A grade raced 35 minutes plus one lap.

    I entered in the B grade.  My logic was that C must be average, and like everyone else, I think I’m above average.  As I checked in and realized who was racing and what grade they were in, I began to question my self-assigned grade.  But, it occurred to me that the worst that could happen was a last place finish.  And, as luck would have it, that is exactly where I finished.

    My official results; minutes:seconds:

    Lap 1Lap 2Lap 3Lap 4Lap 5Lap 6Lap 7Lap 8Lap 9Lap 10Lap 11Lap 12Lap 13Lap 14Total TimeAverage Lap Time
    2:052:132:152:142:182:272:232:192:262:272:252:202:242:2332:392:20

    For comparison, grade average lap times; minutes:seconds (number of laps completed):

    A Avg. LapB Avg. LapC Avg. LapD Avg. LapE Avg. LapOverall Avg. Lap
    2:12 (19)2:14 (15)2:19 (14)
    		2:28 (10)2:33 (9)2:21 (12)

    Full results and more info available on the Adelaide MTB Club site: www.amtbc.com.

    My average lap time was 2:20, which was only one second slower than the next fastest rider, but I was behind the cutoff and finished one lap down.  Comparing my average lap time to those in the C grade, it looks like I could expect to finsih somewhere in the middle grade.  This being the case, I think I’ll spend some time in the C grade and see how things work out.  But, we will have to wait for the next dirt crit in January to see what happens.

    Until then, a photo of a camera Velcro’d to a helmet (if ‘Googled’ is a word, then so is ‘Velcro’d’):

    Helmet, Camera, Velcro

    …and a koala from Eagle Park:

    Koala at Eagel Park

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  • Delayed Updates, Video

    The hard drive crash delayed a couple of updates I was going to post.  So, without further delay, a boring and potentially nauseating video.  I don’t suggest watching this if you suffer from motion sickness, the camera bounces around quite a bit, and with the video sped up 800% it is pretty rough.

    This is the Crafers Bikeway, which runs from Adelaide to Crafers via the Princes Highway.  While the video isn’t all that interesting, or all that steady, it does give an idea of what the route is like.  The Crafers Bikeway is about 10km long, and from Adelaide to Crafers is almost entirely uphill.  This ride was in the afternoon in 35-38°C weather and took about 35-40 minutes to climb and about 15 minutes to descend.

    Gunnar Decal Repair

    In other news, I’ve decided to make the Gunnar slightly more presentable since it now stays pretty clean and doesn’t see much off-road use.  The paint is in decent shape, but does have some noticeable scratches and chips.  The decals have the most noticeable damage where large portions of the black on silver decal is missing.  I have a set of replacement decals for the frame, but I’m going to save these for some point in the future when I get the frame repainted.  In the meantime, I cut new decals from black vinyl electrical tape.  Many of the letters were touched up, and the second “N” in “GUNNAR” was completely replaced.  Not bad, huh?

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  • Dead Hard Drive

    Disk Warrior

    Remember that fast, new 2.5″ 7200RPM Seagate 500GB hard drive that I installed in Mac Mini No. 3?  Don’t bother, it is dead.  It gave no warning (sounds, clicks, errors, etc.), but it died none the less.  Just to make sure, I let Disk Warrior run for about five hours, and it too confirmed that the drive was dead.  Do you like my “screen shot”?

    In a non-scientific study conducted on my twenty or so hard drives currently and recently in use, 100% of the failures have been Seagate drives.  The only other failure being a member disk in my RAID.  Aside from that, I have had some DOA Seagate drives.  I don’t dislike Seagate drives (yet), but I do still prefer Hitachi over most others.

    WD Scorpio Blue 500GB SATA

    That said, I replaced this Seagate with *gasp* a Western Digital.  I don’t and haven’t liked Western Digital drives since sometime in the early 1990s.  In fact, it has been so long that I don’t remember why I disliked them.  So, with no Hitachi drives immediately available, I got a WD Scorpio Blue 5400RPM 500GB drive.  Based on my experience with OE Western Digital drives in Dells, this drive will either be fine, or grind itself into a noisy and expensive powder.  We will just have to wait and see.

    Time Machine Restore

    What about the data?  Well, as with the RAID failure, I didn’t lose any data.  I use a combination of RAID, scheduled automated backups, and periodic off-site archiving to protect my data.  In this case, I used the scheduled automated backups, aka Time Machine, to recover my data.  The disk failure occurred sometime on the morning of 14 November.  I used a Time Machine backup from the evening of 13 November to restore the system.  The recovery process took three to four hours to restore approximately 300GB of data from an external FireWire 400 drive.  Additionally, Apple Mail required around a half hour to rebuild my inboxes, iPhoto performed some sort of maintenance, and for some reason the time zone had to be reset.

    Overall, I didn’t lose any data and the dead drive was only a minor inconvenience.  In fact, the biggest problem I had was locating a SATA 500GB 2.5″ drive locally that was actually in stock.  I have some more details on the backup and archiving systems I use; perhaps they will show up in a future post…

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