Dave’s Good Stuff

I finally broke down and did it. On the way home from Home Depot (yeah, I know… I never go there) I stopped by the Trek store to see if they had a screw. See… I bought a frame mounted tire pump a while back, but the screws weren’t long enough to go through both the pump bracket and the cages to secure into the frame. Hoping maybe they had longer .8 screws, I stopped by. Well… they had one. That’s right. One. That was OK though, b/c one of the two I got at Home Depot didn’t work. I can’t figure that one out, but it’s true. I still don’t like it on account of two different types of screw heads… oh well, it’ll work for now.

So that’s finally taken care of, but what’s really cool is that while I was looking for the screw at the Trek store, I picked up a 2 liter Camel Bak, and a Cateye Enduro 8 computer!

No more guessing how fast we’re going, or what our average is, what time we started and stopped, or how far we’ve gone! I can’t wait until next weekend to try the Lawrence route again and get an exact distance. :)

This little bastard doesn’t interface with a computer for history tracking, and it doesn’t have GPS for interfacing with Google Earth or anything, but it’s a start. For the price, it’s not too bad a deal, I don’t think.

Lots going on lately, so I’ll be taking advantage of a few quiet moments, strung together, to give a rundown.

Music. Three things happened, all at around the same time that caused me to revisit my music collection. 1. The Forges (both hers and mine) died a sudden and unexpected death when trying to move songs over to the 1GB expansion card I bought for them. Oh well… they kinda sucked anyway. 2. To replace the Forges, I picked up Nano’s for both the Woman and myself (new Target card - 10% off entire purchase). 3. I accidentally deleted the majority of my ripped music. Sometimes, symbolic links in unix are confusing. I was reminded of the time Stu lost most, if not all her ripped and downloaded music due to hard drive failure. It’s a dreadfully hollow and sinking feeling. So, I’ve revisited and revamped my .mp3 collection. Following the advice of my brother, I re-ripped all the albums to 256 bit, and have hit the downloaded tracks with tags. Between custom perl scripts and a couple of downloaded tools, I’m getting damn near having everything tagged to taste.

Nano. I really like it. I think it’s going to be much nicer than the Rio Forge that I used to have. The Nano, on the other hand, has so many more features, and so much more space, it almost makes me giddy! Why the Nano, you ask, as opposed to the iPod, that has so much more potential space? Hard drive, sir… the hard drive. Since I’ll be using mine at the gym a lot, I wanted flash memory. The woman wanted to minimize the chance of hard drive failure, herself. Without a hard drive, I’d say the chance of hard drive failure is pretty slim.

House. LOTS going on here. I don’t even know where to start. So, I don’t think I will. You’ll just have to be satisfied by me saying we’ve moved probably around 3 tons of material in the last few weeks. Between furniture, sand, and bricks, we’ve been left barely able to sit upright, much less stand due to exhaustion. We’re definitely getting there. The house is coming together. I think come fall, when it cools down some we’ll be ready to sell and find a larger place.

Riding. Precious little of it. More coming again I hope. Last weekend Chris and I rode to Lawrence again. I really like that ride. It’s just the right distance and has some really nice scenery along the way without too many hills, and only one that could qualify as a small wall. Of course, last weekend, it was in the upper nineties with a heat index over a hundred. It was kinda stupid, but we made it all the same. This weekend the ride should be a lot nicer, in the mid 80’s with humidity that doesn’t leave you sopping wet in seconds. I might even be able to get a ride in both mornings! Wouldn’t that be something?!