wirehead’s blog

I've been busy so I forgot to post over here my Bike To Work day picture... :)

Happy bike to work day!

It was very hot and the VTA train was having problems, so I ended up biking all the way to work, then around a bit at lunch time (free lunch + ride for us cyclists) and then home.

So I'm moving my cycling related content over from here to my own site.  I like the tagging engine more and I'll be able to support some mysterious new cool functionality as soon as it's finished up...

Latest blog entry:

I came to a sad realization.

If I want to get cycling shoes that actually fit, I'm going to spend an assload of money. I look at the online bike catalogs and figure that I'll end up paying about what I'd pay for a normal pair of sneakers for a set of riding shoes.

My wife was training for a half-marathon and Nike was sponsoring the training sessions and so they had a booth where you could try on Nike shoes for the session. I went with her one time and the folks at the Nike booth could not find a single pair of shoes that would fit me. I have oddball sized feet. They are about a half size apart from each other but generally fit in size 12 US EEEE shoes.

more...

Also, I donated to Victor's AIDS/LifeCycle campaign... did you?

(Crossposted from another blog)
So I have biked all of the bikeable areas of Rancho San Antonio now.  Sadly, there aren't very many.  I blame asshole mountain bikers for wrecking too many trails trying to look like the mountain bike advertisements.  Many of the trails I know that I could bike without running people down or causing any more wear than a jogger, but I'm just not allowed.

I biked up the Mora Trail for a stretch..... it's uphill most of the way, so I ended up running out of steam and not wanting to risk my need-to-be-adjusted-after-150-miles-of-fun deraleurs uphill to downshift to the smallest chainring and thus portaging it up the hill.  Got my heartrate pumping.  Mora trail is hard to find...  the Meadow Trail is bike-friendly until it hits Deer Hollow Farm and then it's not bike friendly, so I kept looking to the right trying to figure out where the Mora trail forks off and it turns out that there are three trails that fork off the Meadow Trail and two of them have no-bike signs and one of them doesn't.  And once you get uphill, on top of the Mora Trail there's a water tank and a beautiful vista.

I finally figured out, after a bunch of combinations and permutations, how to properly pack my tripod.  I just use the cargo netting atop my trunk bag to hold it.  I was trying to have it hang down like a pannier bag on the side and that just wasn't working.  But I took my tripod and my 35mm camera loaded with ISO 20 microfilm and the 28mm and 70-210mm zoom lens, plus the G7.  Do I get enough crazy photographer points?  It was 20 speed film that is more like 12 or so in Rodinal and so even in situations where a more normal selection of films would be handholdable, I needed to use the tripod.

So, I biked a mere 8.47 miles and reached a maximum speed of 27.2mph downhill (I used the brakes a lot).  I was getting 20mph on some of the level sections, which isn't half bad for a mountain bike and an out-of-shape nerd but probably not nearly as impressive for a road bike.

I'll post the pictures in a bit.  Still have to finish the roll and develop them and/or download the digital shots.

I think the correct route would have been to do the ride in reverse.  The uphill segment would then be on much less steep streets and then I'd be able to coast the whole way down the Mora trail.  And I think the next thing to explore is to ride to Deer Hollow Farm, lock the bike, and then go hiking.

Still trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my day....

(Cross posted from another blog)

So, first decently long ride on the new bike.  I'm not sure exactly how long because the cyclecomputer got confuzzled after a bit about things (needed to be moved down the fork, I think) and thought I'd reached 75mph.  Somewhere in the 15-20 mile range.

I biked to REI, which involved me biking across several towns, then went to Lee's Comics for Free Comic Book Day, and then found my way to the endpoint of the Stevens Creek Trail, where I biked the entire length of that trail on the way home.

REI was having a sale and I needed basic safety gear and wanted a trunk bag.  I got the Cannondale trunk bag, largely because the Topeak bags are all designed to latch into the Topeak rack and my rack's not a Topeak rack.  The Performance Bicycle store-brand bags were kinda crappy by comparison.  Plus I got inner tube + tire irons + multitool.  See, I've never actually had a flat tire, but I also know that it's astonishingly rare for a cyclist to never have a flat, so it's only a matter of time before I get one.

Way I figure it, the trunk bag's going to come in handy in situations like when I want to bring some photo gear along for the ride or when I want to bring a picnic or other such things.

I used to have a Topeak Mountain Morph pump with a built-in gage but that seems to be off the market now, so I had to get a separate pump and gauge.  The pump I've got is designed to share a set of braze-in eyelets with the water bottle holder, which is actually pretty slick.

(crossposted from another blog)

Okay, the ride isn't so bad now. I have a nice cargo net for the bike so I can strap down a piece of tupperware with my lunch in it and not worry about it leaking over my backpack.

I think I finally have my saddle in the right position. I was having some pain in my left knee that was going away as I inched the post up and finally today it felt just about right.

So last night's dream was weird. I dreamed that I had a really weird dream, which I presently don't know the contents of. But I then dreamed that I woke up and said "Gee, that's a weird dream. I should write it down so I can blog it."

And then I woke up and realized that I had dreamed the whole thing.

Which makes me wonder about what the dream on the inside of the nesting doll of dreams really was.

Max speed: 31.3 mph (downhill)
Distance: a mere 2.43 mi (mostly uphill)

I am sitting underneath a bunch of trees that I've called the Chapel. So far I've seen a bluebird and a woodpecker.

I took back the previous light set and got a front light with a 1w Luxeon Star and a super bright back light. I'll have to do s'more commuting and see how good it looks.

I do like having two water bottle holders because I am not yet in shape.

IMAGE_005_rot.jpg

Final distance 5.34 mi.  I was doing about 25 mph on the straightaway.  Oh, and I found a neato nifty secret entrance to Rancho San Antonio.

I've known this for a while.

Dono, I'm a fan of aging gracefully unless your eyes are really fucked up.  Glasses are sexy and stuff. :P

So I try to mix up the brands of hard drive I buy, just in case one brand turns out to have problems in the long term.

Of the drives that have died, I lost one Seagate after a lot of moving about and, more recently, two Western Digital drives.  And I try to avoid buying IBM... now Hitachi.... after the DeathStar thing.

The first one I've already griped about.

The second one is one of my two photo drives, which has me a bit upset.  The bright side, of course, is that I've got several copies of the digital pics and at least one copy of the film pics on other media... either DVDs or another hard drive.  But I want to make absolutely positively sure that nothing's going to be lost.  Thankfully I discovered problems when the SMART monitoring went off, so I had Mrs. Wirehead copy stuff over last night from the older drive to the newer drive.

So I have a 500gb drive that was intended for me to rebuild my C: drive and the RAID-0 array onto that is now going to be used as one of the photo drives.

Of course, I'm running out of brands.  Maxtor was picked up by Seagate, I don't quite trust Hitachi, and I don't qute trust Samsung.  So it's WD vs. Seagate... and Seagate seems to be more reliable.

(Crossposted from another blog)
So, getting back into riding after several months of no riding is kicking my ass big time.

The new tunnel under El Camino Real for the Stevens Creek Trailis kinda nice, but I still need to find a good way to safely navigate once I've popped up on the other side of El Camino.  The problem is that the part that's been opened dumps me off on the side of El Camino Real that's not very bike-friendly and so I need to hunt down some good internal road connections so I can actually avoid hazardous traffic.  Whenever the next segment opens, I'll be fine... but they have to open the next segment first.

I need to adjust stuff.  I realized on the way home that the seat was too low, so I fixed that.