Author: Eugene

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Mountain bike gearing

22-32-42 on the chainring and 13-15-17-19-21-24-34 for the rear cluster makes for very low gear ratios indeed. I shall have to do something about that to make this bike decently ridable. I’d like to see if I can go 32-42-52 for the chainrings, but I’ll need to do some research to find out what kind of components are available.

One thing’s for sure: this isn’t going to be cheap. Bike components haven’t gotten any less expensive since my road days.

Dan writes:

You know what I need? A bike repair/maintenance/customization/overhaul collective… I do some of my own work, but I have lots to learn. Park Tool has a traveling school, but they aren’t scheduled to come anywhere near Charleston that I can see. I would really like to learn more about the technical side of keeping a bike up, and I bet a lot of people are in my basic situation.

Sounds like a great idea to get a bunch of cyclists together for a basic/routine maintenance workshop. I don’t know if any of the cycling groups in the area already do something like that but it strikes me as a cool thing to do.

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Taking the bike out for a spin

Holy crap, is this mountain bike ever geared low. I think it maxes out at about the middle of the gear range of my road bike. In the highest gear I think I barely cracked 25 km/h in a full out sprint. Not all that unexpected for a mountain bike though, I suppose. This thing would be great back home or somewhere with a lot of steep hills to climb. Around here though, not quite so practical. Going to have to do something about the gear range before I think about taking it out onto the road. Shouldn’t be too much trouble. New set of chainrings and rear cluster should do it. I’ll need to do some research to find out what’s available and count out the teeth on the existing chainrings and cluster to see what I’ve got.

Otherwise it rides pretty smooth. Gets a little bouncy because of the suspension at high cadence, which is going to take a little getting used to. Shifting is a little slack, but I think new cables and a bit of tweaking should take care of that. Few squeaks and clicks that I’ll have to figure out the source of.

It was good to be back on a bike again, but I could definitely feel in my legs that it’s been a while.

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I think I found the camera

I think I found the camera that I want to get: the Panasonic DMC-FZ8K. Got my hands on one over at Circuit City and was pretty impressed with the picture quality (at least what was shown on the itty bitty display) at high zoom and (relatively) low light as well as high contrast conditions (bright sun through the door, regular light inside). Pretty wide range of shutter speeds and ISO settings so I’ll be able to play with low light imaging. I thought some of the buttons were a bit awkwardly placed, but that’s just a matter of getting used to the camera. Uses SD cards, which is a plus, but is powered by a Li-ion battery pack which means I won’t be able to use the pile of rechargable batteries I have.

I’ll have to save up a bit for it, so I likely won’t have a camera for my Providence and Minneapolis trips, but I should be able to pick one up in time for my reunion trip in September (unless I run across another camera I like better).

If I try hard enough, I might even be able to save up enough for a DSLR, but considering the price on some of them, I’ll have to be really really frugal.

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Multiple home pages in Firefox

Don’t know if this is a new feature in the Firefox 3 nightlies or if it’s just some obscure feature in Firefox that I never knew about, but apparently you can have multiple home pages open up when you hit the home icon or when your browser starts up.

Tools/Options/Main – type in or copy/paste the URLs you want to open up separated with a pipe (|). Or open up the pages you want to set as home pages in separate tabs and click the ‘Use current pages’ button.

It’s pretty neat.

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Time for a new camera

Next week I’m off to Providence, RI for the SIIM conference. I suppose if I want to get pictures of my adventures, I’d better go get a new camera soon. My ambitions for a digital SLR will have to wait for a little while.

I’m attracted to the Olylmpus SP-510 because of it’s feature set and similarity to my C-4000Z. Not all that enthusiastic about introducing yet another memory card format (xD Picture Card) to the collection though. The Canon Powershot A710 is another one I’m looking at, although I’ve read a lot of complaints about lousy battery life (but that’s to be expected when you’re only using 2 AA batteries).

Good excuse to make a trip out to Best Buy and Circuit City for some hands on investigation.