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 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.

I like that we are building out rail-based mass-transit infrastructure, but I was a little surprised that the light rail does not have space that works well for luggage.

There is more than six inches between the seats, that’s an exaggeration. There is, however, very little knee space, and definitely not enough space for luggage.

I wrote a while ago about my old workstation being taken down. My (old) website was not the only one being hosted there; Shun Wang also had his site there. He has relocated, though, and his new site is at http://www.shun-wang.net/.

I was confronted this weekend by a friend — let’s call him “Kiran” — who was faux-irritated that I never told him about this blog. Sorry about that, and I am also sorry to anyone else who has landed here and felt similarly. This whole thing started as an experiment, and I believe I only told two people about the blog (one being my mom).

Here are possible explanations for having never advertised this:

• The blog never left experiment mode.
• I did not think it would appeal to a wider audience.
• I was too lazy to say anything.

One or two people have probably noticed that I have not posted for a while. September gone. October gone. Most of November gone. Well, a lot has been going on, but I am not going to go into details now.

An important role that this blog plays for me is that I post news and articles that I find interesting here. This serves the dual purpose of sharing with friends and family and also organizes thoughts and articles that I find noteworthy. Before posting here, I do record interesting things that I find, but not in a consistent way. I tag articles in my RSS aggregator or mark them in some other way. More often than not, I never see those articles again, but the most disorganized thing that I do is to record links as drafts in my email account. During long periods of not posting here, the drafts folder in my email account swells. The worst property of the draft emails is that I do not bother including any information about the links that are pasted there, so I just have many dozen drafts with raw links in them. Often, I never bother to figure out what the drafts are after they have been there for a while.

That previous paragraph is kind of funny, since in many other ways I am very organized with information that I come across. I like to know that I can find things again.

There is another force (other than simply having a lot going on) that keeps up the disorganization. Sometimes I hesitate to post something that I find in the news or on other blogs simply because I feel silly writing about things that everyone has possibly already seen. That concern, however, seems irrelevant given my self-centered goal of organizing my thoughts.

Stopping this rambling post short, I am going to dig out a few of those draft emails.

Back in late January I reported that my workstation at UIUC was going to be taken down. It took a while because another website on the machine needed to be moved first, but that is apparently done because Proteus is now down.