Bicycling

Equipment check and options

2008-06-14T21:09:49-06:00

When pilots go to fly a plane there is a pre-flight check before each and every flight. This is a wise practice for many things including driving and bicycling. As a case in point the story of my evening will illustrate. About 45-minutes ago I left the house for a bike ride. Planning to ride for an hour or so. The story actually starts a couple of weeks back when I picked up a new pair of bike shoes at a REI garage sale. The shoes were just a bit larger than those I had before and were much more comfortable.

This week I got around to putting the cleats on them and tonight I took them for a ride. Everything went well, for a while anyway. With the garage door closing behind me I pulled down the driveway, turned on the bike computer and heard the reassuring click, click as my left-foot and then right-foot clicked into the pedals. Things went quite well for a longish while. Riding around the neighborhood and down some of the local streets and through the park all was well. Fortunately I decided that before hitting the state highway I should make sure the new shoes released from the pedals properly. A flick of the ankle and nothing... more wiggling tugging pulling and nothing. The realization that the cleats weren't tightened down enough floods the mind at this moment.

Now there were a hundred, or at least two, thoughts that would have been very useful at that moment. The first would have been to keep riding. The mind, however, plays more tricks and focuses on the inevitable wreck that is coming. It doesn't take time to think that if you keep riding you can crash in the grass instead of the middle of the street. Nor does it tell you that if you worked at it you could get your foot out of the shoe and come to a more comfortable, if still awkward solution. Nope, the brain at this point is devoted to assessing just how much the coming encounter with the asphalt is going to hurt.

Fortunately I rode away with not more than a large raspberry on my knee. Next time out I think I'll spend a little more time on the equipment check. Especially when it is new equipment.

The second third of life

2008-04-05T16:41:23-06:00

Singing Phil Vassar's song Tim McGraw tells us:

I think I'll take a moment, celebrate my age
The ending of an era and the turning of a page
Now it's time to focus in on where I go from here
Lord have mercy on my next thirty years

I'm measuring not in 30-year spans but in a third of life spans. Having just put up the score card on the first third it is time to turn to the second third. My family was very nice and procured some long-desired toys that will help focus my next third on staying in better shape. The Cannondale parking area now has another member. Sadly, it is also the first Cannondale that I have owned which does not bear the "Made in USA" label. The last Cannondales I purchased came with a manual declaring their proud factory and a video telling the company's tale. Granted the video was a VHS tape which I would have to hunt for a way to play now days but it remains a sad marker on the changing of the times and I contributed to it. Cannondale and Trek among others do still make bikes in the USA but they are the higher end bikes.

Being busy is a good thing. Having made the transition to working for myself being busy is great as it means there are clients who are paying for work to be done. Of course at the same time being "out sick" is not the option it was when one had "sick leave" and vacations are "times where I'm not paid" instead of purely relaxing. It is all to easy to be completely consumed in work in this environment. However, one of the things that I have neglected is spending enough time at the gym and in other pursuits away from work. It is easy to believe that if I work ten hours a day that somehow working 20 hours a day would be twice of good. Of course it isn't. Any productivity will tell you so. One of the great reminders of these new toys is just what good thinking and helpful ideas come from the "rest of life" that get lost in the work-a-holic world.

As a quick example it was while I was out getting feed for the horses and listening to Marketplace on the radio when it finally hit me. The big deception that the local Boise media has been spoon feeding consumers about the Real Estate market. Sure we're used to real estate agents who try to spin the market into some reason to be buying. It's appalling just how many agents are telling the "it's not very bad here" tale. Yet talk to anybody in the business, contractors, builders etc. and you get a very different story. The real issue, which I'll be writing more about soon, is gaming the system with relistings. Relisting a property is the practice of taking it off the market and putting it back on so that some unknowing dope of a buyer will think "this has only been on the market for 45 days" when it has been sitting for months or even a year or more. The Real Estate associations here turn a blind eye to this practice and blithely report the number of days that a house was listed before it sold.

Markets have changed. In a normal market relisting is a gimmick that might help with a sale. If a buyer has a decent agent it won't do much as the buyer will be told what the game is. In this market, however, there are developers with houses sitting and sitting. Things aren't selling. Not in the 45-days or 70-days that the news tells us the real estate people provide. The massive numbers of relistings are serving to provide a falsely positive picture of the market in the Boise area.

Some areas of the country, according to the Marketplace story, do more to prevent this practice. Here, however, the game is being used to deceive the public into believing things aren't as bad as they really are. So not there's one more thing on the to-do list which is going to take some digging to put together.

Picks for the 2008 Tour de France

2007-07-29T14:58:23-06:00

With a fantastic finish to the 2007 Tour de France behind us all eyes turn to what is next. My pick for the top team in the 2008 Tour de France is the Google pro cycling team. With the outstanding Discovery Channel Team looking for a new sponsor it would be an outstanding time for either Google or Apple to jump into the fray. The challenges facing Apple, though, would include riders typing on their iPhones instead of listening to the team car and figuring out how to reinvent the bicycle in a more aesthetic way that still complies with the rules of the sport. Google on the other hand would make a great sponsor.

Poor OLN journalism

2006-07-10T00:38:05-06:00

Viewers of the Tour de France have been seeing the ads that later this year the Outdoor Life Network will change it's name to VERSUS. Seems like a silly change but it also seems their goal is to be yet another ESPN knock-off.

Tonight, however, they mentioned "tune in tomorrow for a big announcement from Floyd Landis' team". Wondering what the big news will be tomorrow? Head over to Google or any newspaper and you'll soon learn that Landis will have hip replacement after the Tour.