The Bike Project - Monster truck wheels

I ride and race bikes as a hobby, and if you hadn't figured that out, you probably don't know me, haven't been around me as I babble incessantly on about them, and probably haven't read much of this blog.  The blog isn't entirely about bikes, but somehow my hobby has found a way to take up 2/3rds of the posts I have written.  When I come to think of it, I guess I'll take this moment to apologize to my friends that sit listening to my inane stories, and I must say that, at least most of the time, it looks like you are half way interested in whatever cycling related nonsense I am spouting.  If you are, good, I feel better subjecting you to my one sided discussions of bicycle related stuff.  If you aren't, you should seriously take up acting as a career.  You are good...Keanu Reeves ain't got nuthin' on you talent wise...  In fact...I'm pretty sure you are like way better 'cause Keanu couldn't act his way out of a wet paper bag and yet he makes A-list money for his movies, and I am somehow compelled to watch them all...Whoah ...

Some fine examples of Keanu's acting.

And here...




Ok, I really didn't mean to get off on how much I love to watch Keanu Reeves movies and still bash on his questionable acting.  I really wanted to talk about bikes! 

Yeah. I know...now you're just dying with excitement...

I, for whatever reason find myself in need of a new bike, and yes, I use the word "need" quite liberally here.  Like I need a new bike like I need to breathe or I need food or something of that ilk.  Ok Ok it's, semantics people!  I WANT a new bike...Happy now?!?  sigh...

Let the butchery of the English language continue.

I decided to try out some huge wheeled mountain bikes before I actually purchased something and burned through the family's savings as a result.  See, how thoughtful of me considering that the family might actually need a place to live and food to eat vs me needing a bike.

Ok, I'm running off topic again.  The point of this was the size of the wheels on this particular bike were going to be significantly larger than my current mountain bike.  This would allow me to take my mediocre downhill and technical abilities to another level without actually getting better.  Big wheels don't get stuck in ruts, roots, and rocks as easily as smaller ones.  Note the fine example of alliteration in that last sentence.  Plus big wheels on bicycles are just like totally waaay cool.  You know...like me...sometimes.

I picked up a demo bike from Cahaba Cycles that would be a good test for 29r wheels.  It's a Niner S.I.R 9.  Now you might think that the cycling industry would have some heavy technical jargon that the S.I.R. stands for, so I asked one of the staff there.  "Steel Is Real" was the answer.  High intelligence and engineering jargon coming from the bike manufacturing industry? -- nope.

I took the bike out for a long 35 mile ride around Oak Mountain, and it felt completely different.  This thing would monster truck over obstacles and rocks that rattled my teeth loose on my current mountain bike.  It was a much smoother ride as well, and that simply came from the size difference of the wheels.

The one big drawback I noted was going uphill.  My current bike definitely climbed better due to the smaller wheels.  There is a trade-off in everything it seems.  The big wheels weigh more and have more mass so making them spin takes much more effort to get going or, in this case, keep going up a hill.  Still it was worth it for the enjoyment of the ride, and fortunately, as I was struggling up steep pitches of fire trail, I could look down at the top tube and read the handy little reminder that Niner Bikes gave me.

 

Thanks guys.  I nearly forgot. 

 

I would have had video of the new ridge line trail to post with this high end cycling analysis, but the GoPro rattled loose and it rendered a beautiful bluebird day filled with scenes of the bike bounding over dirt and rocks completely unwatchable.  Looks like you guys, my loyal readers, dodged a bullet on that one.  Count yourselves as lucky.

 

I'm off to demo a full suspension 29r this weekend which would allow for the rear wheel to absorb some of the shocks as well as the front.  That should be a fun ride, and maybe I'll get the video this time.

 

Have a great weekend everyone.

Waiting for the bus

In a moment of quiet, a very sleepy Ansley was waiting for the bus on the stairs since the gray morning had decided to add a bit of cold rain to the morning chill.  She managed to smile for this picture even though she had been going through the morning with her eyes closed.  I feel bad that she is not a morning person and that the school bus comes at 6:50 a.m. 

At least she smiled for me.

The shakes...

I got out a couple of weeks ago to ride with a few friends, very fast friends, at Oak Mountain State Park. 

I love these trails and the fact that there are 20+ miles of trails where you don't repeat a single foot of trail that close to the house is something that I can't put a price on.  Or perhaps I have put a price on it.  $3 bucks on weekends to ride, the semi regular bike repair, bruised shoulders, bloody knees, or head, or trip to the ER for CAT scans. 

Well, maybe I just don't want to think about the actual price of these "healthy" endeavors.

I was trying out the helmet mount for the GoPro and wanted to see what angles would work.  The video is a bit low and I find myself raising up my head while watching it like I could somehow see further down the trail.  I used the r2 setting for 720p x 1280 HD video instead of the "taller" image of 960p.  I think I'll just stick with the 960 from now on since it captures more of the surroundings even though the YouTube video only goes with the 720 format and "reverse letter boxes" the video with black bars on the sides.  It still makes for better video.  You can see what I mean here in another of my GoPro attempts.

The ride itself was pretty good.  The trails had been freezing at night, and that left the low areas muddy well into the day as the ice melted.  The main, and more established parts of the Red trail were in much better shape.  This video has us on the Lake trail and part of the Red trail up to the fire road.  I wouldn't bother videoing the fire road climb since I really feel that you watching me get dropped by these guys in no time flat and then hearing me sound like a very sickly Darth Vader all the way up the mountain would be less than entertaining.  In fact the sickly Darth Vader part may even be somewhat disturbing.  Disturbing in either the, "I wonder if he is going to be OK?  I thought this guy was in shape!" kind of way, or the "This video should be flagged for unseemly content." kind of way. 

You are safe.  I won't film that climb.  I promise.

Ah, yes, the title of this post.  I guess I should probably try to feebly tie in something in this meandering prose to the title I managed to conjure up.  The shakes.  Not the kind Nicholas Cage has throughout Leaving Las Vegas, but a few others come to mind when watching this video.

First, the helmet mount combined with riding a hard tail mountain bike off road.  There is just no way I can figure out to have a smoother video.  If anyone has suggestions to mount the camera better, please let me know.  And no...mounting it on my hammock instead of riding isn't really an option.  Secondly, shaky mountain bike skills.  There is just no way to hide it.  I love to ride, but I am barely staying upright most of the time it seems.  Finally, shaky mountain bike maintenance.  I won't spoil the joke, but you'll see in the video.  It has to do with hairspray.  (Now there's a teaser if ever there was one.)  By the way, it does work, just not that time...with that type of hairspray.  I'll just use spray glue next time though.

There.  I've tied in the title, rambled on about biking, used two movie references, and thrown in a hairspray related teaser to this post.  check check check and check...

Ok, on with the video. 



Below is the HD link since the film was too big for the frame on the blog format. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfepjKlnfvE&hd=1

It's not bad in the smaller frame.  Just giving you options!

Have a great week and get outside...if it ever stops snowing and sleeting.

Oak Mountain Hiking

I can tell my blogular activities are really getting poor when it comes to documenting some really fun family stuff.  In fact, I don't think that I covered the Christmas Disney trip at all.  I guess that hugely successful family vacations have just become too mundane and ordinary to bother writing about. 

But this, on the other hand, has potential.

We went hiking out at Oak Mountain and had a fine time.  I led the kids through the Peavine falls canyon (if you can call it that).  I let them descend and climb the rocky ledges that make up the "Enter at your own risk" section.  Brenna loved that...well she looked like she loved it, if a stressed out "Oh My! Don't Let the Kids Fall!" kind of expression constitutes thorough enjoyment...  It wasn't that bad, and the kids thought it was awesome.

After breaking trail up to the top of the ridge for lunch, I pulled out the camera to get some photos of our lovely and ever-so-reserved and refined children.  ahem...

The boys...

Aiden...

The whole family at what was left of a little shelter built back in the 40's.

 The fact that the boys seem to have their mouths open in every picture I took is not lost on me.  I am guessing the altitude had them gasping for air?  It's certainly an odd thing since Ansley seemed unaffected, and Brenna and I managed to not look like we were baby birds waiting to be fed either.



We started the hike back to the van on the easy path rather than going across the rocks again, and as you can see below, Aiden got tired and felt that the best plan of action would be to just stop and not get up again.  He was perfectly content to play in the rocks than to take another step.  I had to give him a piggy back ride to convince him to come with us.

Aiden fell asleep in the car shortly after we got going, so we stopped at a cheesy nature exhibit on the way out of the park.  Bryce and Ansley had seen it on the way in and wanted to go look.  There were several birds in large cages for people to see and read about.  The gross looking vultures weren't doing too much on their perch, but the kids were fascinated by the big birds.

"These birds don't move" said Bryce.  "What can we do to get them to move or come closer?"  My first thought was, "Well, just throw something at them!", but good sense prevailed and instead I mentioned that vultures probably aren't interested in anything but dead animals.  "Why don't you play dead and see what they do?" I suggested.

Thump thump... giggle....really loud exaggerated dying gaaaaaassssp....giggle...

 The vultures were unimpressed by their attempts, but I got a good chuckle...

I love my kids...

Family bike riding and a new camera

Yep. Wasting time in front of the computer again.

Brenna said that I needed a "toy" for Christmas, and now that I have wasted literally a few days trying to edit HD video off the GoPro camera for a simple 5 minute video. I finally got the video done. Not to say that it's good, or finished, or going to win me any awards at Cannes.  I just got tired, and said, "There...that's good enough."

First I tried the pre-packaged Windows Live Movie Maker. It would render a video for 5-6 hour and fail. (I would kick it off and go to bed) It failed miserably. It was a free program and you get exactly what you pay for. I also tried the Adobe Premier Pro CS3, which I already owned when I got Photoshop, and it was so complicated that I couldn't make it do anything at all. I would need to take classes and get a Liberal Arts Degree to make that work. Then (insert angelic choirs here) there was the free test version of Sony Vegas HD 9.0. Thank you Sony for making a product I could understand and use. It was robust enough to let me render a cool little intro with lens flare and other effects (It will do so much more, but I didn't want to take the time.) It's a good balance between the junk insta-movie makers and the professional stuff that real producers use. Now that the software review is over...I know I lost most of you already or you are now asleep drooling on your keyboard, here is my first (see I'm making excuses for the pitiful editing and filming already) attempt at High Definition video making.

The subjects combine just about all of my favorite things on the planet. My ever so patient wife, my kids, and bicycles on a sunny day. Dude, there aren't too many things better than that combination that are legal in the States.

Have a great weekend. I'm going to ride the new trails at Oak Mountain before the snow starts falling. Yep, there is a panic in the south. It's supposed to snow 6-8 inches tomorrow, so there might be accumulation of 1-2". I know this because: 1. It's the south. 2. Weather forecasters are always either flat wrong or embellishing. 3. There are no eggs, bread, or milk to be found in any of the local supermarkets. I love winter weather in the south. (deep resounding sarcasm there) It's just chock full of lame...

Chemical Marionettes

A thought crossed my mind this morning, and you can guess by the title of this post, that the thought was serious. I know…that’s really unusual for me, but nonetheless, I thought I would explore it in a post on the blog since putting the question to Facebook is like the ADHD version of writing. Not like this blog wouldn’t be a prime example of ADHD writing in the eyes of Conrad or Tolstoy or Hemingway to name a few, but it actually requires thought to come up with a paragraph or two vs. the vapid style of Facebook status changes.

The question that flitted through my consciousness as I took a pile of aspirin and vitamins with my coffee this morning was, are we all just Chemical Marionettes as a species? What would we be like if we didn’t rely so heavily on chemicals to modify our daily lives?

Now I’m not talking about food since those are chemicals in essence but we use them to fuel our lives and keep our cells functioning at some level. I’m also not talking about antibiotics or cancer medications since those save our lives (most of the time) from pretty horrible and undignified ends. I’m talking about chemicals that have no other function than to modify our worldview by direct action on our brains with no other use by the body. You can ignore my mention of the concoction of aspirin and vitamins I was taking this morning since those impact mainly my physical structure rather than the chemicals in my brain.

What are we doing? Is life so bad? Why do we need these things?

A few stats:
-Over 10% of the 300 million people in the U.S. are on some form of antidepressant.

-Basically 95% of the population use caffeine on a daily basis and 75% of children over the age of 10 consume caffeine on a daily basis.

-67% of the U.S. drink alcohol

-Estimates say that 20% of the U.S. population would test positive for marijuana use if we tested everyone today. (Or maybe that’s skewed by the 99.9% of the Northwest U.S. that would test positive…)

I’ll skip including the harder drugs because while the % of the population using them is high, they generally are not a common drug used daily.

Yes, I googled all this stuff and the sources looked reputable, but could be totally wrong…it did come from the “interweb” and we all know everything out there is based in truth and good statistical science…so a grain of salt is required on my quoted stats folks…
In the end, are we all just totally reliant on chemicals to perform our daily tasks or to make our lives a touch more tolerable? Hence my marionette reference…the drugs pull the strings so we can perform… Ok, maybe it’s a lousy metaphor, but you get the point.

I doubt my headaches would allow me to quit my coffee addiction anytime soon, nor do I really plan to try to quit, but this thought on our society, or perhaps the whole of the human race, was interesting. What would our real “unmodified” behaviors be like? What would our lives be like?

Some facets would certainly improve if we didn’t use chemicals constantly. For instance:
-Traffic accidents would certainly decrease.
-Violence and crime rates would drop with drop without alcohol and drug use.
-Would road rage decrease without everyone hopped up on caffeine?
-We would have more cash to spend.
-Society would be healthier as a whole.

Some things would certainly be worse too:

-Without caffeine, early morning, 2pm, and late night work productivity would drop precipitously. I think I just named most of the day with those times…America’s GDP and it’s higher educational system would be in shambles. (Or would it if people didn’t use alcohol in the evenings?)

-I’m not sure about the usefulness of the vast application of antidepressants across our country.

Make no mistake, antidepressants serve a good purpose and some people really need it, but many are just looking for a way to be calm all the time. There is this perception that we should all be blissfully happy all the time, but things happen that make us sad, or make our lives miserable for a period of time. When we were kids, we didn’t take drugs, we just got through it and moved on. Kids now just take the drugs… I guess we as a species are flawed and are unable to be happy all of the time, but taking a steady diet of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors probably isn’t really effective or necessary for 90% of the people that are now on them.
- Also in the “most certainly worse column”, parties would be totally lame…see I couldn’t stay serious… But honestly, there are only so many board games and rounds of Charades one can handle before the gathering would break up like a glass in a Jewish wedding. We would all be in bed by 10 on party nights and would probably be more productive in the morning.

-New Years Eve…10pm and out…Times Square and a flashy ball? Meh…

The world would definitely be a touch more even keeled. The highs of boozy elation would end and the lows of the resulting bleary eyed mornings would be no more as well.

It’s interesting to think on how human beings became this way. Is it a way to give us some sort of competitive advantage or take the edge off the drudgery of our daily lives? Why we are motivated to find a way to make the chemicals fire in our heads to produce experiences that we perceive to be better. I guess we are designed to try to change things and produce out of the ordinary feelings. Even children spinning in the front yard until they fall over are modifying their perceptions and making themselves feel altered. Is that everyone’s first mind altering experience? The kids that do it until they throw up and then get up and keep doing it are the ones that their parents probably should be worried about.

If society stopped all unnecessary chemical intakes of caffeine, alcohol or whatever for a month, would life be better, worse, or just the same once the addiction headaches were gone?
I’ll bet the profits for Betty Ford Clinics would be simply astronomical for a time. Better make it two months in that scenario to get a good sample month once everyone got back to normal after de-tox.
I find myself finishing this rambling post without a good answer on the topic, but I do hope you found it an interesting to think about, and that you didn’t find yourself heading for the liquor cabinet to make yourself feel better about wasting time on this blog.

Hair Loss and Residual Self Image

I needed a haircut, or at least I thought that I did. Normally, I keep my hair really short because it gets all poofy and ya’know like totally unmanageable and stuff. It could even get so long and unruly it might actually take on a life of its own and I’ll be combing it in the morning and it will purr or gnaw on the comb or something.

I mentioned this fact to my wife during dinner last night (the fact about needing a haircut not the thought that my hair might start to purr or something equally horrifying). At that moment she made a comment involving the length of my hair and how having my hair cut professionally instead of doing it myself might hide my bald spot.

The last two words took a second to sink in…

Bald Spot…Bald spot…Bald Spot… echo echo echo

WHAT?? I laughed at the ridiculous nature of what she had said and blew it off as best I could. All the while, those words rattled around in my head. “BALD SPOT??? What bald spot? What the heck is she talking about? I don’t have any such thing… I’m only 38, brilliantly handsome, witty, athletic and pretty much super-cool in every way… People like that don’t have bald spots… Unheard of…

I must have looked a little shocked, so she deftly pounded the topic home with a verbal pile driver by saying, “It’s not so bad, really. You are tall enough that most people don’t see it.”

“Ack! Oh yeah, that reeeally helps assuage my fears.” I thought. (Although I may have actually voiced the “Ack!” part.) Her “You’re tall” theory didn’t help at all, especially since I know that I spend 99.9% of my time sitting at a desk behind a computer where all the people that walk in are naturally taller than me!” Crap! I was shaken to the core…

Everyone has an image of what they look like in their head, and that is how everyone assumes everyone else sees them. I think Morpheus called it “Residual Self Image” as he explained the computer world to Neo in the first Matrix movie…uh…I’ll move on now…

Sooo, I had this image in my head, and it wasn’t too far off the one I see in the mirror every morning. Well the reflection wasn’t too different except for the parts where my mental image was more handsome, less scruffy, less bleary eyed, somehow younger, and exuded an aura of sheer-mega-awesomeness as compared to the skinny, goofy looking guy staring back at me from mirror.

Even after last night’s comments about bald spots, I went about cutting my hair this morning and pulled out a mirror to look at the back of my head to make sure I didn’t miss anything or accidentially shave a Nike Swoosh back there. That’s when I finally noticed a version of me that…uh… everyone… else… sees…

There it was in all its unflattering glory. Good Lord! There is this great thinning patch on the top of my head! What the heck is going on here? I’m sure it’s never been there before!!! It’s like a miniature version of the deforested Amazon river basin…without the Toucans and Howler Monkeys… Which, by the way, just might just take up residence if I let my hair get too long. How long has this follicly-challenged patch been there??? How could this have happened? What’s next? Am I going to wake up one morning and discover a second face on the back of my head or something? Like the evil Voldemort that appeared on the back of the head of the Dark Arts professor in one of the Harry Potter movies.

*Side note* Ok, the super-cool and witty part of my super-extra-mega-awesome-self-image is a little tarnished now that I realize I have referenced both a Sci-Fi movie and something from a Harry Potter movie in the same post. Crap… I’m about 2 seconds from realizing that I am a serious mega-geek.



Nope…I’ve repressed all that now. I’m like totally waaay cool again.

My reaction to the previously unknown/unrecognized balding was quite calm, reserved, and most assuredly dignified… In other words, I don’t think I sobbed too loudly at the shattered remains of my self-image scattered on the floor.

In hindsight (i.e. now that I have stopped pitifully moaning about it) I guess I knew about the euphemistically “thinning hair” since I have been cutting my own hair for a decade or more. I had always managed to explain it away as yet another bad self haircut that I convinced myself I would get right the next time.

Man, sometimes life sneaks up on you I guess, or maybe I really will try letting someone else cut my hair…