• Father’s Day

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    jumpy

    Eric, Dad and I went to Castlewood for a quick ride on Father’s Day. The ride started of dry, but some rain storms come through and made things very muddy. After getting a good thick coating of mud on everything we found a swollen creek. Guess what? My M2 and Eric’s Pisgah both float! I don’t remember if Dad’s Trek 970 did. Good info to have, I guess. I also discovered that it is very difficult to ride a bike when the handlebars are underwater. I’ll be overhauling the M2 soon, or will I be finishing the single speed instead???

  • Round and Round

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    Flat Tires Suck

    I thought I’d beat the storm today and ride early. I left home about 8:15 AM, planning on riding the same 19.2 mile route I’ve been working on this year. I got to the half way point in 31 minutes, about the same as my last attempt. But, instead of turning around, I continued east. At approximately mile 25 I turned around, a 50 mile ride would be enough. Between mile 40 and 41 I heard a hissing sound. Not a big deal, eh? Well, I thought I’d be clever and ride without a spare tube, patch kit or pump, since it was only going to be a 20 mile ride. The leak was fairly slow, and I made it to the next town, at mile 41.7. Since the storm was coming in (I’m lazy, and didn’t feel like fixing the problem), I caught a ride home from Rachel and Sheltese. (Thanks!) Anyway, the total for today was 41.7 miles, 17.1 MPH average, and 2:26 total time.

    Salsa

    Shimano issued a recall on some of their XT, XTR, 105, Ultegra and Dura-Ace skewers. After finding out about the recall, and that my front skewer was recalled, I went to the shop that built my wheels to get the skewer replaced. Shimano would not deal with the shop, since they were not an authorized Shimano dealer. Ok, so I go to another shop in town that is an authorized dealer. This shop was not interested in helping because they didn’t build the wheels. Nice, I should also mention that we have purchased a bike (recently) from this shop, and have been going there for almost 10 years. We’ll, if that’s how they treat their customers then I’m not interested. After calling Shimano directly, which is what they suggested to get me out the door, I was told that I could not get the part replaced because I did not have an “account number”. I suppose only people with “account numbers” need safe equipment. As for the rest of us?

    I went back to the shop that built my wheels and scored a set of Salsa flip-offs and trashed the Shimano skewer. I’ve never had to deal with Shimano before, and now that I have, I am not impressed. I am also very disappointed with the other shop in town passing the buck and not helping. Guess where I won’t be going anymore?

    Footnote: I finally got the replacement window regulator for the Acura. The dealer that shipped the wrong part shipped the correct part and refunded my return shipping. The $9.02 they refunded for the shipping did not cost them much, but kept a customer. Something a certain bike shop I know of might learn from. Oh, and installing a Accord/CL window regulator is simple and quick. The window works again, and I saved quite a bit on labor. I give the other regulator another year, max.

  • Out with the old

    Old Crap

    This pile of plastic and heavy metals was replaced by smaller pile a plastic and heavy metals. Our new Core Duo Mac Mini replaced the two G3 iMacs and my old Athlon XP 2000+ (The two Performas were just in the wrong place at the wrong time). Luckily, I have found homes for the iMacs, and the PC. The iMacs are actually pretty nice, and run OS 10.3.9 acceptably. The PC, on the other hand, sounds like a dump truck and throws off enough heat to keep a small house warm. The Mac Mini is fully optioned out with a decently fast dual core processor, bazillion GB of RAM, more than adequate hard disk, and a really sweet remote control. It runs XP and OS X very well, the only issue so far being that XP does not like the bluetooth keyboard. But, more importantly, the Mini takes up as much space as about one speaker from the PC. I was a little sad to see my PC desktop go, but it, along with it’s 700 cooling fans had to hit the road. Oh, and if you were still wondering, Need For Speed (the best car arcade game from the late 1990s) works just fine on the Mini. The departing iMacs and Performas take with them our last CRT monitors, finally.

    So, now we will be down to only four computers, from nine. Here are some specs on what is left:

    Total online disk storage: 1.5 TB
    Total pixels: 6.3 M
    Total RAM: 5.3 GB