Kreitler Rollers

Got my new Kreitler Rollers today:


The Poly-Myte edition.They are pretty sweet. Retail for about $350 I believe, but the club has a pretty good discount. Also coming with the rollers are 8 of the logo stickers with the rockin' Kreitler dog on it:Or maybe that is a charachter from star wars.... a wookie? In any event I tried them out and they are super smooth... much better than the Performance brand ones I bought (and returned) for the same price. My knee was a bit under the weather, so I just did a short spin on them to try them out... maybe three days in a row is a bit much yet. Take a a day off again and see if I can't ride on Thursday.

Also noticed that Mercyhurst's ECCC race weekend(pdf) (April 15 and 16) features a 7.5 mile ITT. I hope I can get a good amount of time in on the Nova TT machine to rock that thing out. I'm hoping for a headwind alllll day long.

20-something cyclist is reminded of prepubescent days of decreased muscle mass

I took advantage of the 50 degree weather and snuck a ride to Boalsburg and back in today. I never knew that the loop had a number of categorized climbs. I have felt more tired after training rides, but during it I was dying... I think I just need to get my lungs back. It did feel a lot better than the last time I rode the loop about a week ago. Riding in the saddle is almost the same, the only issue is when I get out of the saddle I can still feel that the lateral side of my right knee is swollen. There is still a noticeable difference in the size and strengths of my two quads... hope that levels out soon.

One scare during the ride was for about 10 minutes in the middle of the ride I thought my knee was feeling really weird. At the top of the stroke I could feel pressure on the outside top side of the joint. Took me a few minutes to figure out, but it ended up just being my knee warmers. It had shifted a bit and were tight enough that the swollen part of my knee was rubbing up on it. Felt pretty good once I realized that.

Next mission: Lower Lime


Can you guess which knee below was surgically altered?

Late drop is the shiznit.

Late drop is a very cool thing, granted you have the credits left. I was taking a semi-conductor class... and once I realized that I didn't like it I wondered to myself why I was taking another class with EE undertones, and dropped it like a fat kid drops a carrot. Then I picked up the book and threw it on half.com, and within a few hours had sold it for $60.00. Rock on right? Now I have more time during the day to do my work so that means more Mario Kart in the next week or so, and then more Erik Kart after that when I start venturing outside again on my bicycle.

For those of you who have not yet late-dropped a class, I would reccomend it. I feel like a new man, and it's all because I don't have to go learn about electron configurations tomorrow. So if you have an elective that you don't like, drop it and sell the book on half.com and blow the money on bike parts, you'll be better off for it.

That and, this will be my new helmet come March... I might have a larger left quad and be off the back on lap 2, but damn, I'll look good.

Maybe I'll give this another whirl.

I ran out of useless things to say last semester, but now that I have two assignments due tomorrow, I have plenty of useless information to bestow on none of the people who read this.

School has been hot and heavy the first few weeks. I'm taking 17.5 credits (1.5 of which is the Century class though). Still 16 credits is a heavy load for ME... I'm taking STAT418 which I've been warned is hard, but doesn't see too crazy yet; ESci 314: Semiconductor Materials because I might want to do some stuff with solar panels down the line; ME440 because I have to; ME 434 Compressible Gas Flow because I wanted to; IE312-this class blows, and ME84 Heat Transfer Lab because I liked ME412.

On more interesting fronts I've been doing PT for my knee which I got surgery on over the break. For those not in the know I got arthroscopic and an open lateral release. The former you probably know is looking and cleaning out the interior of the joint while the latter is the cutting of tendons on the lateral (outside) side of my knee. This will help my kneecap track correctly. I plan to slowly get back to riding outside in the next few weeks, though I still don't know when I'll be able to train for real... it's still a bit tender when I really put some torque through the pedals.

Also look at the pretenders who wish they were as cool as me: Spohn and Munas.

ESPN sucks these days...

I'm really dissapointed with televesion in general the past, ummm 15 years or so. That's a pretty big chunk of change there, though, so I'll keep the bashing narrowed down to Sports Center.

I always used to watch SportsCenter in high school, and it showed clips of the games with commentary given in english and without a soundtrack provided by Linkin Park and Jay-Z. They even showed daily highlights from the Tour, but I'll keep cycling out of this for the most part. Today if you turn on SportsCenter you might not even see a real press confrence. That's because ever since baseball season has ended, ESPN thought we needed some simulated baseball action, and decided a fake news confrence for individual teams would be a good idea. This might be the stupidest thing I've ever seen on TV (including Laguna Beach).
But after the press confrence is over, all SportsCenter is these days is arguments and clips of thugs playing basketball or football players smacking eachother to the tune of cheesy rap music. The Budweiser hotseat and The Coors Action play of the game team up with the Honda Highlight... what the hell? Doesn't SportsCenter make enough money without whoring itself out? It's bad enough that there are 14 Pepsi Arenas and 4 Verizon Stadiums. Do we need highlights named after companies too?
Before Monday Night Football I think I might have witnessed one of the low points of televsion. Four grown men were hooting and hollering at players getting "jacked up" during Sunday's game. Now, the stupid tribalesque banter dosed out during the clips was pretty bad, but the fact that before moving on to the next clip they'd all chant in harmony "Whomever got JACKED UP" was a bit much to swallow.
ESPN needs to get back to its roots... take the rap music and the internal commericals out of SportsCenter, and while you're at it take poker and rodeo off too... what the hell? Put poker on the gameshow network and just make rodeo illegal.

Country music still blows, but Napster is fun.

I've been trying to branch out a bit musically recently. Not quite digging country yet... I still don't understand how I can hate all country while I still like most bluegrass. I know most country has deviated quite a bit, and is full of twang and muscular "cowboys" with spray-on tans in front of F-16s telling me why I should send my first born to Iraq... but I would still think that I would find SOME country I'd enjoy if I appreciate bluegrass. Am I wrong that country did, albeit loosely, grow out of bluegrass?

In any event, I've been perusing Napster's library a bit more recently, and have found quite a lot of good music that I've heard before, but never really got the name of. The tab entitled "recommendations", which I believe is new to the present version, is pretty cool as it lists a bunch of bands that are somewhat similar to the band you're looking at. The band I found tonight is Goldfinger. I've listened to Reel Big Fish since high school, but only tonight did I download more than "Here in your bedroom" and "Red Balloons" by Goldfinger-which was listed under the recommendation tab of Reel Big Fish. If you like "ska", their greatest hits album is quite tasty.

And... when the original artist who sings 99 Red Balloons breaks into German, that it hot... foreign languages are sexy.

Facebook is nuts.

Well I'm not sure how far I'll take this blog thing... but I do know one thing after seeing a weird headline on today's Collegian. I won't be bringing up all the illegal shit I do on here... that's for sure, take a look at how the University Police are using facebook to find people who rushed the field after the OSU game.

I agree that beacuse facebook is public domain that the police can access the information, and use it to find people who have commited crimes. Especially the students who assaulted police officers on the field - find those pricks at any cost. But looking over pictures to find people who ran onto the field? Why don't we use the Beaver Canyon cameras to catch jaywalkers who thought they slipped one by big brother?

Anyway. The moral of the story here is, I'm not going to talk about all the weed I grow in my room if none of you post back on here about the teenage girls I usually have over for dinner.

Testing out the waters.

I'm testing stuff out here.