I got all excited when I saw GT has a new single speed for the masses, the “Peace”. Skipping the smart ass comments about the name, I’m not sure I understand the reasoning behind it’s stock build.
Here is a picture and the specs. If you’re not going to put suspension on the thing, why do disc brakes? Lack of braking power was never an issue for me while single-speeding (grunting in agony was, but that’s a different story). The whole retro-grouch thing doesn’t hold water with those brakes on. Pick a theme and stick with it. GT, gimme a simpler one, or one with suspension, and I’ll run out and pick one up.
A while ago, I worked as a guide/mechanic/barista in a pretty cool bike shop. Our lead mechanic was spot on and actually did time on Le Tour. I trusted him to work on my bikes, and didn’t really hesitate to leave them around the shop.
One day, I got on my fully to make a lunch run. I’d left it there overnight when a storm blew through. He knew that I liked tooling around in big ring/small cog. I made it to the only stoplight in town and did a track stand waiting for the light to change. It changed, I tried to take off and down shift – I ended up going over sideways like a first-timer in cleats. He’d thoughtfully reset the limits on my rear derailleur.
Revenge is best served cold. I needed a plan. It had to be diabolical, and it had to be so simple that there would be no reason for him to look in the “right” place. One of the people in the shop came up with a suitable evil plan to even the score. We waited about a week and then took his beloved road machine, a paperclip, a piece of thread, and a washer. We made a little spring out of the paperclip, attached the piece of thread to it and tied the washer at the end. Said paperclip was then inserted into the seat tube, far enough up that it (and the washer) couldn’t be seen. The key was the length of the thread, short enough not to be seen, long enough to let the washer rest easy on the side of the tube when not in motion.
Of course, he heard it clanging around every time he rode. As soon as the bike was on the stand, the noise would mysteriously disappear. It took him four days to figure out (I thought he’d get it in one). I’ll never forget struggling to keep a straight face as he sat looking thoughtfully at his bike on the stand.
I received a new HP workstation last week at work, had to rush it into deployment because another one failed. No sweat, I thought, same model, same build, there will be no issues. Uh hunh.
My user comes to me and tells me that he can’t RDP into the machine. Hmm, I thought, it has to be going into Power Save. I check the settings. Oops, not it. Maybe he put it into hibernation. Guess again. Firewall? Nope… NIC? Scanned and 3389 is open. Hrm…
The event log showed “RDPDD.dll failed to load”. What? The conflict, it seems, is not really a conflict, but session memory allocation for the driver for the nvidia video card. Odd since I requested an identical build out to the last one he had and that one actually worked out of the box. Not enough memory is being allocated for the RDP session since it shares it with display and print drivers. Solution, update the driver or do some registry diving. I chose registry diving, just to be sure, and because I wanted to leave the office without hunting and pecking for the right driver/version.
I added the following registry key:
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
“SessionImageSize”=dword:00000020
Frustrating problem solved, and it really only took an hour or so.
I went down to the REI at Confluence today to pick up some odds and ends for the summer. Everything was going pretty well, I got my stuff and headed home.
I drove up Colfax and traffic was snarled. It took a few minutes before I saw why it was snarled. There was a woman lying in the street. She’d been hit by a car, a pickup truck, I think. Her bags were scattered all over the place and it didn’t look good at all. I pulled off on Emerson or Williams or one of those streets to get out and help. The ambulance showed up as I pulled over. None of my training covered auto accidents, and with much better help present, I moved on.
It’s been on my mind all day, I can’t shake the image of the scene. There is no mention of it on the local news sites so I’m not sure if she was OK or not. If you happen to know, email me at cjones at this URL minus the blog.
This week started with me in a giant hole. The barracuda lost DNS and decided to stop delivering mail Monday morning. I have no idea why. Everything was configured correctly, but after an hour and a half, it decided it was OK to start delivering mail. I did update secondary DNS on it, but really have no idea if that had any impact, as primary was set correctly. That is not a good feeling on a Monday morning.
Later that day, a runaway snapshot on a VM took hold of a database server. Excellent, I thought, where’s the hemlock? That fixed, it decided to lose the NIC binds. All the while, requests for DB modifications are coming in, at least, coming in once the barracuda woke up.
Climbed out of the hole today. A Dundee Original Honey Brown as a reward. Now to Google for that Cointreau pearl thingy Buzz tweeted about.
The snow is coming down again, and my new Procurve decided I really, really needed to experience the weather. At least the texts and calls didn’t start until 8:00am, so I did get some good sleep. I waded through the dirty Slurpee conditions to reset it. Thanks HP. I was warm, now I’m freezing and I’m wet. That’s sure to improve my mood.
I’m not sure why Dunkin Donuts is so proud of their products or why they claim to be “blue collar”.
I come from a blue collar town where Dunkin could not get a foot-hold, why? Their coffee sucked and their donuts tasted like crap. The local chain blew them out of the water at every turn. So, when I hear Dunkin = Blue Collar, algebra tells me what they are actually saying is Blue Collar = Crap (and probably chuckling about it every time they say it). My home town deserved (and preferred) better than Dunkin, I think everyone else does too. A $100 million ad campaign certainly says to me they aren’t quite blue collar. And I still think their donuts suck.
The last five days have been pretty much devoted to the bike. I broke out the truing stand and got my back wheel in shape this weekend. It took some tweaking on Saturday and Sunday but has held steady for the last three days. I’ve seen Waterton Canyon three times (no big horns sighted, bummer), Matthews/Winters once, the Cherry Creek Reservoir for a maintenance ride on a two-fer day, and today was Three Sisters. I did have a bat-man squirrel sighting today, those things are fearless and kinda scary looking. It ran beside me on the trail for about a hundred yards up Evergreen Mountain West with a pine-cone or something large (maybe the head of one of its rivals) in its mouth.
October riding in Colorado is excellent. I didn’t make it to the trailhead until around 2:00 and the temperature was perfect, maybe around 70 degrees. I was expecting the climbs to really hurt, but compared to the climb up from the Strontia Springs dam at Waterton, it was actually pretty easy going. That tight slotty switchback on the Sisters frustrated me. I can’t get the front wheel aligned correctly to hop the back end the rest of the way around. I have a much easier time with it downhill. Up top on the other side of the road, I rode up my favorite rock and kicked back for few minutes. I swear the sun goes down earlier up there, it looked like it was about to set and it couldn’t have been very far past 3:00. I had to break out the vest for the downhill because I got chilly during my break. Even so, it certainly beats climbing while it’s 95 degrees out.
I think I have the headache thing licked (famous last words), the next few days should show whether I’m fooling myself or not.
And more good news, I just got off the phone with Delynn, and it turns out Apple relaxed the Non Disclosure Agreement today — woot!
Back in the day, I bought the first version of the Stumpjumper FSR XC. It was a very very nice ride. I rode the crap out of that bike. I went through four drive trains, two front forks, and three wheelsets. I finally had to put it down a couple of years ago because the bushings had ovalized their frame mounts. The swing arm was kaput. I stripped all of the parts, because I figured I would need them again. I was right.
I found a new one! Picking it up tonight. I think this time around, I’ll leave the granny ring on. It’s gonna be good riding this summer.
I keep an eye on the bike postings on Craiglists (Denver/Boulder) for good deals. One thing I’ve noticed lately is this guy selling older MTB’s as single speeds. He brands the rebuilt bikes as ReSSurection (the cap SS is short for… duh, Single Speed). I’d thought of doing just that, as single speeds are generally very, very overpriced at the retail level. Here’s a link to one his prettier ones.
As I said, I’ve actually thought about doing the very same thing, but never got past the “think” stage. I’m glad someone is doing it, there are a lot of perfectly good frames floating around out there just looking for a new life.
One of the things I’ve noticed on most of his rebuilds is the lack of chain tensioner on what appear to be horizontal dropouts. Other than that, they look pretty good. He seems to have tapped into the “spirit” of single speed. Low-tech bikes ready to go thrash on the trail (even though he slaps slicks on them).
