New Commuter....

Well I decided to go the much easier route to get a new bike to kick around town with. Lady called into the shop the other day. She was cleaning out a shed in the back of a place she rents. Had a few bikes there she wanted to get rid of. One was a Schwinn Varsity. Some other junk with some duct taped stems. But there was also a 97-98 Trek VW Mtn bike. 19". 7 speeds. So I fixed her up a bit, and will have all the parts I need once I get some stuff off my old mountain bike that was junked together from freezethaw two years ago. I haven't ridden since I almost died riding it (wasn't my dumbass fault that time though) because it's an absolute piece of shit. But the cranks/BB are good, as is the front wheel, and that's all I need to get this thing running. Maybe a 7 speed cassette too. Those aren't too spendy though.

Yeah. so it's purple... can't really tell in the picture. But it'll take some fat tires and fenders, so this will work all winter long baby. Sahweet.

Also had another idea regarding switching bikes around. I think I'm going to use my old race bike, Ti Airborne Zepplin, as my new TT rig, and sell the Nova (current gay looking yellow TT frame) on eBay. I think the better fork and stiffness of the Zepplin outweigh (pun fully intended) the weight savings of the Nova (Al) over the Zepplin(Ti). So... look out ECCC, I'm going to have a Titanium time trial bike. That kid must be really fucking fast. He has flames anodized onto his Ti TT frame!


Going to put some more flames running down the downtube, and then something where the bike brand would normally go. Ideas are welcome. Stud has already been considered and is likely. Chrono is also up in the running. Maybe I'll figure out how to do those voting online things and we can have a slugfest, and maybe JUST MAYBE Steven Colbert will find out about this and ramsack my election and I'll have to write something like "Colbert" on my bike. That would make my day.

Forks aren't supposed to bend like this...

I finally sold the Redline cross frameset, but I was oh so very close to ruining the frame, and my body, before ever selling it...

I was riding down the sidewalk next to College Ave near Hout's on my Fuji commuter, holding the Redline in my left hand. A car looked like it was about to pull in front of me, so I went to hit the brake with my right hand. Now... I have my brakes crossed up, so this was my front brake. I looked down at the caliper to see it engage the wheel, and then move forward, because it was loosening up off the nut, and then give way. So I immediately loose all braking power and am just coasting. The car doesn't pull in front of me... it sees me coming and is waiting, but it doens't matter because I never made it as far as the car. My front caliper swings once or twice in front of my bike, and I'm thinking... shit I got to stop and catch that thing, so I take my right hand off the bar and try and reach for the other brake, which I can't get with my left hand becuase I'm holding the frame that I'm on my way to sell!! But before I reach that brake...

Boom. caliper runs inbetween some spokes, and completly jams up my front end. Bike flips over. Somehow I manage to jump off my moving bike (around 10-15mph) and land, running, in the middle of the traffic lane of College Ave. Now thankfuly there are no cars in College, just that one car looking to turn onto it. Well that car waits a second, sees that I'm still living, and takes off. I slowly collect the fact that I'm the luckiest piece of shit roadie ever. If I were some BMX or mountain biking fiend, then that would be a cool dismount, but hell, I shave my legs. I never run off my bike while it's doing flips underneath me, and not while I'm holding a frameset in the other hand!!

So... damage to the bike: The fork is absolutely fucked. As you can see in the pictures below both blades are bent back, and obviously not planar anymore. Riding the bike now is interesting... getting out of the saddle is out of the question. I ordered a new fork for it with cantilever brake mounts, and I got some braze-ons for the back that I'm going to weld on. I'll have to remove the bridge in the back that supports the seat stays and replace it with a bridge further up, or a plate up by the seatpost. So basically I'll have a single speed cross bike. Schweet. I'll post some more about the construction of this later on...

Check out the fork... and how close the front wheel comes to the downtube....




This picture is square on from the side of the bike. You can clearly see the bend in the fork, and the fact that the blades are no where near planar anymore. Sahweet. Maybe I can make a toilet paper roll holder out of this fork.

The paint came off the part of the fork that was put under tension. The front wheel here is very close to being in dish, so you can tell that the fork is really out of wack.... The metal stretched out causing the paint to flake off. The paint is fine on the front end of the frame, and nothing indicates that the frame was effected at all.




Another shot of the paint off the fork blades, and my extremly clean braking surface.

Good vibrations

I'm sitting in class the other day and someone's phone starts to vibrate. Ya know, that quiet reminder that everyone in the room can hear. Now I know full well that my phone is turned on silent. But as the vibrating noise is heard for the third time I reach down just to make sure. Open up my phone carrier thing on my Timbuk2 bag, and nope, not me. But right when I reach down the noise stops. The teacher looks at me. What!? seriously man it wasn't me!! So now I'm trying to find a pencil or pen or something I can pull from my bag to say, "see... here! that's what I was reaching for, not my phone!". But I got nothing, so I go up empty handed, taking the blame for the phone noise. That got me thinking.

We have custom ringtones. Why not custom vibrators? Now I know the ladies out there are saying, "hell yea!! I want some custom vibrating action." But seriously. If you could also program your phone to tap out some simple rhythm, then you'd know if its your phone right away. Now certainly this wouldn't matter if you had the phone in a pocket, as you'd feel it right away, but with everyone putting phones in bags and stuff, it's really hard to tell who is vibrating and who isn't. So here is my challenge to the cell phone companies out there: get me a phone with some customizable vibration action.

No more Ivan with CSC

Well the breakup with Ivan Basso and CSC finally officially occurred today. I figured this one had to be coming since reports were circulating ever since the Tour that Basso and Riis were not talking at all. Ivan has been in contact with Discovery Channel and Team Milram. I can't see how Discovery would ever sign him. Doping has been a problem that has not been much of an issue for Discovery, and I would hope they would want to keep it that way. I'd also feel really bad for Levi if they added Basso. Levi would still be a prominent rider for them, but I don't think he'd get the same 100% support at the Tour that he is likely to enjoy if he is the sole leader. I'm not even sure Basso is going to make much more noise at the Tour anyway...

Basso is going to have a quiet future. He'll join a team, and race without doping... which for him means getting dropped on the climbs that he had enjoyed success on before. I hope to see Ivan go to the Tour next year with Milram, be in the top 5 or so going into some mountain stage, and loose 10 minutes. Then of course NOT gain 9 back the next day by injecting testosterone directly into his testicles.

I'll be happy this Spring racing in the Men's B field in the ECCC, as I'll know that no one there is doping.

Energy Consumption... by States

I'm taking an online Energy course, EGEE 101. It's basically the easiest thing I've done here at PSU, and keeps me full time. Anyway, I came across this graph below (originally shown without the colors) that shows total energy use, and energy use normalized to population.

I realize you can't read anything in the image above, but if you click it it will come up full size, and should be readable. The first graph is the total energy per state. As you can see the red/blue (as defined by 2000 Election) is relatively well spread out. But the second graph is the energy use normalized to the population, basically how much energy is used by each individual person in those states (the black one is the US average). The first 16 states went to Bush. 16 states! These weren't the states that were close either, these were the blowout states of Texas and the midwest. Ya know, the ones they colored in about three weeks before the election. What does this tell us? Republicans use more power than Democrats? Not exactly, but it's interesting to see that the Republican dominated states are much less energy conscious. Now certainly places like Alaska have the fact that they are constantly heating their homes, which is a huge part of personal energy use. Other than that though, you have 15 states in the main body of the country that says, hey... the hell with you, i'm burning some oil in my front yard in a large barrel and you can't stop me, and I'm going to vote for child molesters.

Ohio and back

Took a little road trip out to Columbus, OH this weekend to visit Karin and my brother Todd, and my niece Cheyan. 18 months old, seriously coolest baby ever. She knows most of her colors... though most of them are usually "yeah-yo" until you tell her to guess again.

Here is a picture of me helping her pump up Dad's wheels before his cross race:


And a picture of us hanging out in the car



I drove back to Happy Valley Monday morning after the weekend and was pretty freeking tired. Stopped at a gas station that had a Starbucks attatched, and got a coffee and a lemon pound cake thing. When I went up to order, I asked for a "large coffee and a slab of the lemon pound cake". The recently employed hippy looking no good cashier looked at me and said, "You want a venti?" I just looked at her.... I wanted to say "I don't want a large Farva, I want a litre cola." But I felt like she wouldn't get that one. I just nodded.

A Venti? Are you freeking kidding me? Your company is from Seattle, shut the hell up venti. Is that italian? Starbucks? Quit it with your stupid sizes.

Bored in Engl202C

This is how much I care about Engl202C (Technical Communcation)

how about those geography skills. Don't be jealous. And yes I know I re-drew the Maine/Canada border a bit... but seriously... who cares, some moose?

Riding

Took an hour cruise around Centre County this afternoon. Knee felt pretty freeking allright for the first time in a few weeks. So hopefully the 6 advil a day and icebag of frozen corn is helping. Definetly going to keep a low profile until mid-November though, when I hope to start piling on the base miles and lifting. Maybe I'll have a powertap and a new CAAD9 frame by then... that'd be pretty sweet.

Also found out that my helium wheels I got at the swap are pretty f'ed up. I heard that some tubular helium rims had a problem with the nipples pulling through the rim, and upon close inspection the rim definelty has a lot of little micro-cracks (like the technical jargon?). So.... eBay! Fucking swap meets... good and bad. Just have to be careful... wrap it up.

Lehigh Valley Swap

Woke up at a brisk 4AM to head out to Lehigh Valley for the Fall Velodrome Swap. I packaged up a bunch of my junk to try and sell. Ended up parting with about 40 bucks worth of stuff I won't be needing. Spent most of the time working for the shop selling bikes and gloves and stuff. Big catch of the day.... 90 dollar pair of Mavic Heliums! Not bad! I'll probably use them as a low weight road race wheel set (ie when I don't want to use the front carbone/powertap) and then for cross next fall. Sahweet. Netted about 30 bucks, Mavic Heliums, and an Ultegra crankset which I realize I probably won't need when I buy this before cross next year:
I am looking forward to cross in the fall, but most of all I'm just hoping that I can put in all the training that time allows for this spring. Getting sick of injuries piling up. Therefore I will be wearing kneepads 24/7. And to answer your question Whitman, no.

Study Day

Well I took the GREs today, and I sucked it up. I don't think it'll kill me for most of my schools, but doesn't help my case for reaching for places like RPI or Cornell. I was especially pissed because I never really had trouble with the timing while practicing, but I pretty much screwed it up on the real thing. The problems were getting harder and harder, which is a good thing if you know how the GRE works, but I only had 6 seconds for the last question, and just guessed without even reading the whole question. Blows. I must have missed about 3-4 questions. I don't think I'll take it again though, time is pretty short and I'll still be able to get into a decent enough program I hope.

Also finally got a Dr. appointment for my left knee problems. Penn State Orthopedics..got in about three weeks sooner than at University Orthopedics. Freeking a man... I need to be better by mid-November to start putting some base miles in. Hopefully I can get some good tips to help get this taken care of as soon as possible.

Applied for a few spring internships too. One in State College, and one in Allentown with Air Products. I'm hoping to land something for Spring and Summer, and register the spring section as an offical internship with PennState...so I can race! I might have to register the whole thing as an internship and graduate at the end of the summer, but we'll see. Push comes to shove I'll just do an internship for the spring and work at the shop again this summer and race on my PSU CAAD9 as much as possible. I'm looking forward to that thing now... reallly looking forward to that.

GRE + Grad Schools

Well time off the bike has to be filled with something... and for the last few weeks it's been practice GRE tests and grad school hunting. After talking to professors and a bit of web searching my list is, in somewhat of a semblence of order:

1. RPI
2. Cornell
3. Virginia Tech
4. Penn State
5. UConn
6. Univ Central Florida
7. Case Western

I'm looking to get into a program where I can specalize in fuel cell technology. I really dig the elective I'm taking on the topic this semester, and I think it's a cool new wave of the future... as long as we can figure out how to get some hydrogen without raping the Earth.

I'm taking the GRE's on Friday... all the way down in Harrisburg, the closest testing center to State College. I'm not too worried about them, as I've done as much practice as possible. For those familar with the test I keep screwing up those damn quantitative questions dealing with the graphs or figures. I don't know why, I guess I'll just have to make sure to take enough time and not rush through those. Everything is pretty easy, you just have to figure out the easy way to think through the problems.

I'm getting pretty close to having the cash for the PowerTap. I have about 400 on hand, will be getting 130 from my security deposit (and another 130 once I keep threatening legal action) and whatever my Redline cross frame gets on eBay. I'm hoping to get at least 350. Hopefully I'll get the PowerTap and can put it to good use right away. Also trying to put some cash away for a CAAD9 PSU custom painted frameset for 375. That would rock... need to get some paychecks for that though...

And one more note, the party was off the hook. Thanks for those that showed up, and thanks to those who got girls to walk all the way from Burrowes. Clutch. Look for another 1105 bash when the weather is warm again... it's not an indoor party kind of place. This weekend we'll be crashing our neighbors party though, feel free to join us.