Anthology of Interest

For some irrational reason (fun), I stripped the derailleurs and back brake and stuff off of my bike, and got a wheel with a track hub. I also replaced the bottom bracket and cranks, which were totally shot anyway. So now I have only one gear, I can't coast, and my legs are sore in weird places from using my legs as brakes. And I can almost do a track stand (which is possible on a normal bike if you are on an incline), except for my pesky lack of balance (which is improving).

There are a bunch of supposed benefits to riding fixed, but the most important is fun. If I get stronger, that's good too. This Sheldon Brown guy has lots of good info on all things bike related, and even helped me out on Usenet by telling me what tool I would need to remove the bottom bracket bearing cups (very old non-standard Shimano stuff).

So far I've ridden only two fixed trips, but we plan on going to Sydney tomorrow, so that will give me a chance to really get a feel for it.

There are photos from out little trip downtown available. This was the first time I ever took pictures from on the bike. It was set on the wrong mode though, and we had more than the usual number of rejects. Gallery generated with Ryan's Cornice mod, but the plain jane template is my own. Cornice mod is cool.

We went to see Kill Bill Vol 2 on Tuesday night. As with Volume 1, it was pretty violent, but not as much. As the reviews said, it was dialed back a notch, with a little more character development instead.

There was some great spoofing of old kung-fu movies, when The Bride goes to train with and old Kung-Fu master. It's so cheesy delicious you just can't help but laugh, but it's also obvious that that is what he was going for. There is the age old kung-fu movie plot line where some adversary kills someone's master and revenge is required. It's excellent.

If you liked the first, you'll like the second, I think.

My supervisor installed a gradcam yesterday. It's actually just for video conferencing when she goes to Vancouver.

The gradcam idea is from phd comics. Specifically, this one, this one, and this one.

I also got a chance to video conference with Dave, who is in San Francisco. He went to the Apple store across the street to get on a machine with enough horsepower to do it. That was pretty cool.

Another movie from the Canadian cinema, balancing the francophone with the anglophone, the drama with the horror. Yeah, is in a way a girly movie (Tamara made fun of me while renting it), but it's a gory horror movie too. If the Bubba Ho-tep mummy was going to give Tamara nightmares, this one really would have given her nightmares, so it's a good thing she didn't watch it. It's pretty much all about puberty bring out the monster within, taken really literally, which is a pretty common theme for werewolf movies (or TV shows).

Excellent acting, pretty good puppetry (way better than low budget CGI could have done I think), chills induced in the appropriate places (although that might have been due to the window being open). Good movie, although maybe not the one for those who are squeamish about the female side of puberty.

We saw this a while back, at Cinecenta. This is a movie from the French-Canadian cinema, and I think it won an Oscar for the best foreign film. And now for my best, most cliché movie reviewer line:"it paints a damning portrait of the Canadian health care system..."

But it really does; maybe hospitals in Québec are worse off than those in Alberta, or maybe I just have been fortunate enough to have been able to avoid hostpitals in general for quite a while, but in this movie it's pretty bad. People are stacked in the hallways and so on. It's actually a critical part of the story; a man is dying and his stockbroker son comes from back from London and throws some cash around to give his father some last moments of dignity. He also goes to a great deal of trouble to get all of his fathers old friends together again, which is good, because they each have an excellent sense of humor and really lighten the movie up.

This is a really excellent movie, funny and moving, and a great portrait of a father-son relationship.

é is my new favorite HTML character identity.

This one has a simple plot, almost like a Dick-and-Jane reader for preschoolers. It has realllllllly obvious wire work. People fly in straight lines for miles it seems like.

BUT, there is some pretty cool action and some pretty good lines. If you are into comic books, and know the Hellboy books in particular, then you'll probably enjoy this movie. Otherwise, you might as well go see Ella Enchanted or something, you know, if you liked the Princess Bride, and wanted to know what it would be like with more singing and dancing.

Double plus evil undead Nazi bad.

"My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die!"

As I predicted, Bubba Ho-tep did indeed turn up at Cinecenta. We went on Thursday night. It was pretty funny. Tamara even liked it, so much so that she murmered somthing about getting the DVD. But she still doesn't like Army of Darkness. This one admittadly doesn't have the chessy lines and cheesy puppets that Army of Darkness does, and it's overall a lot more subtle and refined.

There are quite a few crude jokes, but some of the best stuff comes from Bruce Campbell deadpanning Elvis lines, like "thank-you, thank-you very much."

Double plus undead good.

I showed Tamara how to use Exposé today. She says that I singlehandedly increased her productivity by 10 percent. Yay for Exposé!

We went around to the local bike shops and got Tamara on a few bikes today. She tried out a Cannondale touring bike and some hybrid. She descided that she would prefer the drops (ram horn handle bars) to a flat one and that a proper touring bike would be better than a hybrid. Only one shop actually had bikes built in her size; another shop is putting one they had in stock together for her to try out.

My bike needs a new bottom bracket and cranks. There was a bit of play between the bottom bracket axle and the left crank, which is what I think used to cause it to "clunk" on occasion. When I got the clipless pedals they exacerbated the problem and the crank actually started walking off the shaft. So there's been more play in it since. I can't decide if I should fix it, which would be at least $100, or just get a new one alltogether. You know, one for which parts can actually be found, without having to replace huge chunk of the component group. I should see how much rust there is in the frame. Might as well chuck it if the frame is going to rust out from under me in a year. It wouldn't be bad to replace it. The top tube is a little bit too long for me anyway.

Some one was wondering where I got the term "brevet", which I also misspelled as "bivet" in my last post. The cycling use kind of lines up with the dictionary definition. From the Randonneurs USA site, I stole this definition:

brevet (bruh vay) - Literally, the word means "certificate", "patent", or "diploma" in French. In "randonneuring", it means two things: certification of having successfully done a randonné, --indicated by a small numbered sticker placed on a completed brevet card --, as well as, by extension the long-distance event itself (at least 200 kilometers in length). Completing a successful brevet means one's ride has been certified and registered in France, and the rider's name is added to the roll of honor, going all the way back to 1921. These challenging rides can also entitle the rider to enter longer events such as Paris-Brest-Paris or Boston-Montréal-Boston. As used in the "randonneuring" world, the terms brevet and randonnée are often interchangeable, but in common cycling usage, a randonnée might be considered to be less structured or formal than a brevet.

My recent 80 km excursion got me thinking that it would be fun to do longer and longer trips. It would be nice to see some more of the Island and do some camping, and then we can use that camping stuff Stephen gave us! So I started googling around for stuff, and it turns out there is a whole branch of cycling called Randonneur cycling, which is basically marathon or endurance cycling. Various clubs hold events called brevets (say "brev-eh", not "brev-et", you dirty anglophone!) which basically consist of getting to various checkpoints within a specific time span. It's not usually considered a competative sport; more a of personal best kind of thing. The sport's big event isParis-Brest-Paris, a 1200 km trek in 90 hours (some do it in as little as 45) held in France every four years.

I mentioned doing an Island end-to-end to Tamara and she suprised me by saying that she would be up for that. She doesn't enjoy our 13 km jaunts on the Goose to downtown, but that probably due in large part to the fact that her bike sucks. So we are going to look at getting her a touring bike sooner or later.

Touring is sort of the black sheep of the cycling world; everbody want to mountain bike or road race. I've been trying to find out want is really needed for a touring bike; some things are obvious: rack mounts, triple chain rings and approriate gears for hills, fenders. Others not so much: long wheel base for more relaxed turning, softer tires for a better ride. I finally found a decent article about touring, or rather about it's death. But there are a few hints about what to look for in a touring bike.

Of course we can't just do a 1000 km trek with no training; I'd like to do some of the shorter brevets, and Tamara needs some long rides too. We would also not do the end-to-end as a brevet; we'd do something like a 100 km per day. Five days up, five days back, lots of sight seeing.

"Nothing better to do on a Sunday afternoon than write letters to the politicians to bitch about what they are doing!"

See her blog for details.

I expected to sleep in this morning, since it's been a long week, but I got up at seven and couldn't get back to sleep. Tamara made waffles, and I looked outside and decided to go for a short ride, you know, on impulse.

Two hours and 40 km later, I'm calling Tamara from Sooke: "I know I said I'd only be an hour, but my ride got a little out of hand."

80km isn't bad for practically the first ride of the season. I have to start taking more water and food with me though. I had to buy water and a powerbar in Sooke, and then Subway in Langford. Waffles and coffee can only carry me so far.