sjh - mountain biking running linux vegan geek spice - mtb / vegan / running / linux / canberra / cycling / etc

Steven Hanley hackergotchi picture Steven
Hanley
About

email: sjh@svana.org

web: https://svana.org/sjh
twitter: https://twitter.com/sjhmtb
instagram: https://instagram.com/sjhmtb

Other online diaries:

Aaron Broughton,
Andrew Pollock,
Anthony Towns,
Chris Yeoh,
Martijn van Oosterhout,
Michael Davies,
Michael Still,
Tony Breeds,

Links:

Linux Weekly News,
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Girl Genius,
Planet Linux Australia,
Bilbys,
CORC,

Canberra Weather: forecast, radar.

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Fri, 29 Dec 2006

Wee Jasper on the road bikes - 11:27
In preparation for the Alpine Classic (to ensure it is comfortable to complete rather than painful) a bunch of us went for a "lovely"? long road ride from Canberra to Wee Jasper and back yesterday. Crash's recollection suggested it was fairly flat and around 70 KM each way, I guess this is almost accurate as there are no individual long sustained climbs, and it is about 74 KM each way from the start point at Deeks Drive. However if you take into account the extra 14 KM each way to and from home and the fact that added up there were 2300 metres of altitude gain during the ride the claim of it being flat and sort of easy becomes more dubious.

What the ride definitely showed me is I really need to do a lot of work in the next month to ensure I am ready to have a comfortable Alpine Classic, I do not have enough long road KM in my legs currently to do something like that without pain and extreme effort. The ride yesterday was however a lot of fun even though it was tough. We left at 9am (leaving home at 8:30am) and got back to Deeks around 5:30pm, at which point Ron had called his wife Annie for a pick up to avoid the last 15 KM home so I also got a lift home with them to leave the ride distance at around 160 KM for Ron and I.

Riders on the day were Simon, Crash, DeathMarch, Darryl, Ron, and I. Simon was as always very strong, Darryl appeared to be getting stronger as the day wore on also and DeathMarch did an astounding job of it considering he has only been riding again for a week now and has been mostly not riding for the last year. The hamburgers at Wee Jasper were indeed some of the best I can imagine ever tasting, as we told a local, we heard they were good so rode from Canberra for a hamburger. There were a few more sections of dirt road than I had thought, one I knew for sure was on Fairlight Rd before we hit Mountain Creek Road, then another I had forgotten on Mountain Creek road not long after we turned on to it. Then about 5 KM of dirt on the way down to Wee Jasper just before the fun final descent down to the township, apparently this used to be about 10 KM so it had improved already. As we were on road bikes with 23c tyres the dirt was somewhat tough at times, there were 4 or 5 punctures in the group (fortunately I did not get any) and the stutter bumps on the first section of dirt were rather pronounced and harsh.

The ride is highly recommended though, a lot of fun was had, it is a little unfortunate I forgot to tell Tony or Hugh about it, however they may have found it fairly tough.

[/mtb] link

Unexploded softdrink - 11:22
When I got home from a 160 KM road ride yesterday I put a bottle 1.25 L bottle of flavoured mineral water in the freezer to cool off while I drank a bottle already cold from the fridge. I subsequently forgot it was in the freezer until this morning. Just now I had a look to find it was in the freezer, solid, but unexploded, neato, the amount of soft drink, for whatever reason, did not cause the bottle to explode when it froze solid. Just goes to show absent mindedness is not always as bad as it could be.

[/various] link

Tue, 12 Dec 2006

Tuesday afternoon milk carton blogging - 12:00
So no photos, and possibly not directly about milk cartons, though there is mention of printing information other than missing person details on milk cartons in this story. Kottke had a link to a news story about the US Dairy Industry Crushing an Innovator who tried to get around the entrenched milk price fixing system in the US.

Maybe it is because I am a West Wing junkie or maybe it is because it is just interesting to see some of the ins and outs of the system over there, but it is a fascinating read into US politics as they relate to milk (and subsequently milk cartons (to tie in with this post)).

It does definitely seem the various big companies in the US Dairy industry have a lot of money to throw around, thus I am not surprised the guy who owns milk.com is holding out for serious offers to buy the domain only and is otherwise happy to use it for his own purposes. Good on him.

[/various/milkcarton] link

Thu, 07 Dec 2006

Not worried about the scratches showing. - 14:39
So I competed in the AROC Brindabella Challenge Adventure race on Friday night last week with Andrew Rowe and Bruce Luckham, then yesterday afternoon I competed in the AROC corporate challenge with Danielle Winslow and Jeff Howell.

Both of those races were a heck of a lot of fun, short enough that it does not really hurt to get through them, a lot of interesting and different legs. In the Friday night race one of the checkpoints was at Jamison Pool and we had to go down the water slides three times in order to collect the control. The race yesterday had a few more of the novelty legs than most of the races, such as building a billy cart form parts in a pile on the ground and pushing a team mate around a track without them touching the ground or the billy cart collapsing.

As much fun as the long races such as 24 hour adventure races (Geo Half or the Full I guess) or similar are, they take a lot of time to commit to, these shorter races are easier and still a fantastic way to spend a few hours. Though there are side effects, because in a short race you want to move fast and wearing gaiters simply would not make sense (over heating, and really not much time spent scrub bashing), thus when you do a bit of scrub bashing you are likely to acquire new scratches on your lower legs.

People are used to my legs being scratched to heck, and it does not really matter what they look like, however outside just now I had to pull my socks up high and look all preppish so as to cover the bloodied scratches and stop flies congregating on my lower legs. At least I do not have to worry about what attire I can get away with if my legs are too scratched, Danielle was pondering if she could still wear a skirt to work after the race last night due to scratches. Though if I were pondering the choice of wearing a skirt to work there would be more significant things going on in my psyche than being worried about the odd scratch <g>.

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Mon, 04 Dec 2006

I wonder where that email notification is - 18:28
Nice to know that the early bird registration for lca2007 I made will have a 10 day payment window once they inform everyone who registered for early bird by email that we can pay.

I wonder when they will contact people and tell them they can pay? Not everyone who has registered will read blogs, nor will they all be hitting reload on the conference website every few hours, it is nice to know we gave our email addresses with our registrations for a reason. At this rate I at least will not have to get my boss to enter credit card details until the 14th of December at the earliest....

Yes this post is somewhat tongue in cheek, however I am entirely convinced they need to honour their 10 day window from the time of notification by email.

[/lca] link

Singlespeed/Fixed Road bike, the new N+1 - 17:36

Single Speed/Fixed Road Bike (fullsize) 		Yet another N+1 happened on the weekend. In this case a single speed/fixed gear road bike. With the option of a freewheel on one side and fixed the other side of the back wheel.

I put a few photos and words about this bike up on a Fixie/Singlespeed Road bike page. I have not yet ridden it in fixed wheel mode, and I am not game to ride it around Cotter/Uriarra tomorrow morning, I will probably take it on the Bilbys Road ride on Wednesday morning though.

[/mtb/gear] link

Fri, 01 Dec 2006

Reasons to use quality patches. - 14:05
Generally I purchase tube patches for bicycle inner tubes in strips, the Cure-C-Cure weldtite brand patches that most shops here sell in strips for around AUD $2 or $3 for 6 (in various sizes).

Recently however I wanted to repair a few tubes sitting in my office (though I wonder why I bother these days when I can purchase 10 tubes or around AUD $30 from a number of places) and did not want to ride over to a bike shop, so I purchased a bunch of dodgy round orange and black patches from the on campus bike shop. No name standard looking patches.

Guess what, they really do not bond well, I did everything as I should, scouring the surface of the tube, applying a thin smear of glue to both surfaces, letting it almost dry, applying the patch and waiting for it to dry for over 24 hours (with some pressure on each patch point). I went to use two tubes I had repaired with the dodgy patches yesterday and both were leaking out the side of one of these rather large patches, obviously the patch rubber had not bonded properly with the tube rubber. Ahh well buy new tubes, toss these and remember to get and use quality patches next time.

[/mtb/gear] link

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