Introduction

As I was about to leave for work last Wednesday I noticed that the front tire of my bike was flat. “No problem”, I thought, “just a quick fix.”

This was only the second flat I have had since getting my bike, so doing this simple task takes a little longer than it should. I was “happy” to have the opportunity to rehearse the motions at home before having to do it somewhere else.

My first flat happened within a day or two of getting the bike. The cause for both flats was that the rim tape was in the wrong position. For those who do not know what I am talking about, a quick explanation follows.

Wheels

A bike’s wheel consists of a hub (the thing about which the wheel rotates), the spokes, the rim, and nipples that connect the spokes to the rim. The nipples drop in through holes in the outside of the rim (the outside being the part where the tire and tube go). These holes are drilled through the rim and have relatively sharp edges; sharp enough, at least, to wear a hole through the tube. To keep the tube from deflating due to contact with the holes, some sort of strip is placed along the trough of the rim.

This strip — rim tape — had moved out of place for both of my flats.

My rim tape is a a sort of plastic that does not seem ideal. It is not glued down everywhere. Tension is supposed to keep the unsecured portions in place, but that is where the failures keep occurring. I am going to investigate this a little more and possibly replace the rim tape with a more cloth-like tape.

Extra Trouble

Since I was in a hurry, I swapped in my spare tube with the intention of patching the other tube at work. When I got my tire back on, though, I was having trouble with one of the brake pads always contacting the disc (I have disc brakes on my bike). Before this episode I was not too mechanically familiar with the brakes.

Prior to exhausting all ideas, I looked down through the gap between the pads and the disc and noticed a piece of metal that looked entirely out of place. This gave me cause open the brake assembly and investigate, which was something I would have been doing sooner or later with or without cause. Of course, disassembling something unfamiliar always carries the exhilarating possibility of not knowing how to reassemble it.

I found two bolts that appeared to hold the thing together and was amazed at how much they had been tightened. (Note to self: check if the bolts were tightened to some specified torque and handle as appropriate. The idea of the brake assembly coming apart during a ride is unappealing.)

When I finally got the two bolts out, half of the brake came off (as expected) and then popped into three pieces. Not too bad, but you never know what you are going to get. The pieces’ purposes were pretty straightforward: the external housing, the brake pad, and a semi-springy metal piece that serves a role of limiting the motion of the brake pads. The out-of-place piece of metal that I referred to above was the semi-springy piece. The issue was that one of the “arms” had been bent and was between the brake pad and the disc. I am not sure if it was there before the tire was removed and replaced, but it seems fairly certain that the squeeky noise coming from the brake recently was related to this.

Using pliers, I simply bent the part back into its intended shape. Hopefully that will be the end of that. If that part was between the disc and brake pad for a while, I suspect the pad may have worn unevenly. I did not think to investigate this before reassembling the thing, but I will check it out next time the brake is disassembled.

I wish I had taken pictures of all of this to make it more compelling, but I was in a hurry.

Next Time

Overall, I enjoy this sort of thing. I will, however, be making changes to make the work environment more efficient.

Having a repair stand will make doing this stuff easier and more fun in the future. More space would be nice too. Also, a separate T25 star-shaped wrench would be handy. I have this wrench on my multi-tool, but it was not convenient using it through the spokes to adjust the position of the interior brake pad.

For all of you out there who are wondering where I will be from February 24, 2010 through February 26, 2010, I have your answer: I will be at the SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP10). The conference is being held in Seattle, so really, I will be pretty much where I would have been anyway.

Let me know if you want to meet there.

Now that I am getting more serious about using my bike, I am ready to begin exploring phase two: events. Although I lived in Iowa for 20+ years, I never had the desire to do RAGBRAI while I was there. I am now thinking that I would like to do it sometime (add it to the list of things I want to do eventually).

For those not in the know, RAGBRAI — the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa — is an annual, organized, week-long bike ride across Iowa. They announced this year’s route tonight:

RAGBRAI XXXVIII will treat riders to one of the shortest and flattest routes ever as it winds through northern Iowa from Sioux City to Dubuque.

That combination means the 10,000 riders will navigate a 442-mile route that ranks as third-easiest historically, at least as far as hills and mileage go. Weather remains a wild card. So train well.

It happens in late July.

So, who’s with me?

IRIOTI: I read it on the internet. (Therefore, it must be true.)

I clearly recall being told in elementary school that the skin colors of dinosaurs are unknown because the necessary parts do not survive the fossilization process. I think that bothered me at first. I got over it eventually and had no trouble accepting that dinosaurs probably were similar in color to some selection of extant reptiles. Still that’s not as nice as knowing for sure.

Let’s put aside dinosaur skin color for now. Scientists have discovered pigments in the protofeathers of some dinosaur fossils. The new observations are of melanin-containing organelles called melanosomes, which exist in the feathers of birds today.

The two most common types of melanin found in modern birds are eumelanin, associated with black and grey feathers, and phaeomelanin, found in reddish brown to yellow feathers.

Both of these types melanin were seen in the fossils being studied.

National Geographic: Dinosaur True Colors Revealed for First Time.

Here’s one of the articles I have in my backlog of items to share; it is from a while back.

Back in December, a respectably large cache of garden gnomes was discovered in a Mount Vernon, Washington resident’s back yard when high winds knocked down her fence. The fence was concealing around sixty yard gnomes — at least some apparently stolen from other yards — along with other yard ornaments. See the link for more details.

Seattle P-I: Gnome-napping: Thefts may have created backyard statue stash.

I have already hinted that I read many articles that I feel are worth sharing, but never get around to writing anything about them. Explanations of this behavior include being busy, lazy, or not really having much to say, other than something is interesting. As described earlier, this leads to a build up in the various (lame) places that I store the links. To mitigate this, I have started using Twitter to make small posts about these interesting articles. That’s all fine and good, but that means my reader(s) has(ve) to check two places. I preferred the idea of having all of it in one place, hence the revamp of parts of the site. I am now using Lifestream to pull in my Twitter feed and displaying that in the new, right sidebar of the blog pages.

Since it has been a while since I messed with CSS, I had to tinker around with stuff for a while to get it right. I found some insight about float elements here and got a lot of help getting my second sidebar in place by looking at this example.

Consider this a technical preview for the moment because I have not modified all of the page templates to work with the new stylesheets. That’s why the tags page, for example, is missing its sidebars. I will fix it soon, but I need to move to another task for now.

The Meadows Field Airport in Bakersfield, California was shutdown on Tuesday by bottles of honey. They did not know they were dealing with honey at the time. From “Bottled Honey Shuts Down California Airport” in VOANews:

Two Transportation Security Administration officers were also treated and released from the hospital after being exposed to what were described as “fumes” from the bottles.

My path to the VOA article: Boing Boing >> Backwards Beekepers >> VOANews.

I plan to add new memory to my desktop machine around the time I install Windows 7. A few months ago I checked the price on two more DIMMs of the same type that are already in the machine: $32 at the time. I should have bought then because they are now up to $50. Oh, well.

The cause for the upward shift? The general sentiment seems to be simple supply and demand. Some have it as demand for DDR2 has fallen, and others have it as the supply was too high.

I have decided not to wait and get it now.

I just pulled this one out of my email drafts folder.

“Dream of solar sailing in space lives on in new project” discusses an announcement by The Planetary Society to build, launch, and test LightSail-1 — a small craft that will be propelled by solar sail. As explained in the article, previous attempts to launch solar sail craft failed.

I have always been intrigued by the solar sail concept (I am intrigued by a lot of things, though) and will try to keep an eye on this.