Ahh, the great relaxation that comes from Spring Break. My last one, but the best. I finally got around to getting out of town and still got the chance to do some riding. Bonus.

Tuesday was the big day, with an 8-hour driver down to San Diego to visit a dear friend of mine. Her birthday was Thursday, and we had a great night out enjoying some brew and dinner at a local hangout. The pulled-pork sandwich at Nick's was great and the beer cold. Really, we had brew every night (well, I had brew every night) I was down there, varying from hefeweizen to guinness. A great time indeed!

Also got the chance to catch up with my buddy Tim, always good. Unfortunately, Dom was busy with work and wasn't able to make it out to relax, but hell there will be another time for sure.

So I had a great time. Some really great things will be coming in the future, and I look forward to everything and everyone involved! Thanks Andrea!

After messing with things for an hour today, it appears that my chainring side crank is boogered on the spindle pretty damn well. I couldn't geat the darn thing off with a mallet, nor could I cut the spindle. Looks like this old boy is going to have to spend some scrilla and drop it off at the LBS. Disappointing as I really wanted to get some riding in today. I suppose thats how things are sometimes and that I'll just have to get it done with help. The bonus is that I'll probably take the chance to get in there and really clean the frame up.

Now I can look at getting me a dedicated toolset for the bicycles so that I can finally get in and service the hubs. Looks like I'll be giving pricepoint a few more of my hard earned dollars.

Here we have the aftermath of my ride to work yesterday. Ouch! Look at that break. I'm thankful it didn't happen on the trails, and an added bonus that I didn't even get a scratch. Now its off to the LBS to look at upgrades for the bike to keep this from happening again. More later!

Well, on my way to work yesterday the darnedest thing happened. About 4 blocks from my place while coming off of a curb, the bottom bracket snapped on the left side. So there I am, cat-like reflexes armed come to a safe stop on my feet while my left pedal and crank go clanking away on the asphalt. Holy shit. Are you serious? Well, I guess thats what I get for bunny hopping my XC bike off of flights of stairs and other various things. I suppose I should be happy that the frame didn't eat it with my large frame riding atop it. Gotta say, the frame may have relatively little travel, but its bombproof.

So, I get the glorious fun of removing and installing a new BB. I figured I'd order up some new tools and go to town on my front and rear hubs and rebuild them. They could use the TLC after the abuse I've put them through. I'll post pics later of my poor, poor KHS.

We had to attend an out of class lecture by author David Quammen for my bio class this evening. It was interesting to the point that had you read the book, he didn't have anything extra to say about it. I ended up leaving a little early because I simply couldn't stomach any more of a lecture that was really a recap of his book we read for class. Had he thrown in some extra things during the lecture, I'd have been overjoyed! However, he decided to merely recap the book. I stayed for about 45 minutes, and let me tell you it seemed like hours.

I wish that lecture series would be more informative sometimes. His book was witty enough to keep me from beating my forehead against the wall, but jeez man...don't use the same humor word for word during your lecture. I rather like somewhat less formal lectures, but there are times where it seems that lectures of that nature fall short on the delivery of information. The very thing people want when they attend a lecture. Now, had I not read the book the lecture would have been a great recap of the experience. But it seems to me that one wouldn't be able to take much from a lecture on a book if you'd not read at least some degree of it, am I not right? Granted, this practice seems to be less optimal for courses because one tends to drift when you're simply hearing what you'd read the night before. Maybe its just me over thinking things again, but I just think that lectures should really focus on the delivery of information in a manner that those attending, whether read up or not, can benefit.

Yay for ham sandwiches. Delicious!

Well shoot, its been a good while since I've last posted something new here and I suppose thats a bit selfish of me. Life has been busy, and I've gotten back into cycling a bit more. Its a great thing since I can not only bomb the hills and have a tremendous amount of fun, but I can take and work off some of these pounds that have been accumulating on my body over the years. Here I come ladies!

Some other new things include new computer hardware along with some new cycling hardware. Up first in the mix is the ol' computer. After a long stint with the northwood p4, it was finally time to retire it as my primary desktop. The system that replaced my burned out linux machine is now the new primary rig, which incidentally received a few new upgrades in the process. First off, a new video card. The eVGA 9600GT Super Clock to be precise. A great card! For the money spent, I've been extremely happy with its performance. I can play any game I want with the highest settings XP will handle, sometimes with decent FSAA turned on, at my monitor's native resolution of 1680x1050. Thats pretty damned good for a $180 video card. Helping the new card along was an upgrade to 4GB of ram, though after many years of supporting Corsair, I'd made the switch to G-Skill. Performance about par with Corsair, for a fraction of the cost. What? Can't tell the difference between the performance of the two? Neither can I. The processor is an overclocked e4400 running at 2.6GHz, being cooled by the most awesome Scythe Mugen HSF. Decently quiet, especially compared to the old rig, and performance vastly superior to it. An Enermax Liberty 500watt PSU and Asus P5B-MX motherboard finish up the mix of upgraded parts. Sure the motherboard and cpu are lower end, almost towards the bottom really, but they do the job. How many $900 systems can play Crysis at 1680x1050? Yeah, I didn't hear anyone pipe up.

On the bicycle front, I've gotten back into riding the KHS again. I forgot how good of a bike it was, it really is a pretty capable bike if you're willing to deal with some harsh landings from time to time. Travel in the rear is a piddly 2.2", and the front not faring much better with 2.5" aren't exactly ideal for dirt jumping or moderate Freeride, but heck...I'm willing to just do it. The frame is the strongest part of the bike. Good thing too, as my body frame is big and heavy to boot. So I've upped the rear spring from a 200lb spring to a 600lb one and swapped out the handlebar, grips and pedals as well. Went from being strapped into the ol' thing to platform bmx pedals. Nothing like grinding up your legs, but hey...no pain, no gain. A chain tensioner keeps my chain from slipping off of the chainring, even on some hard drops or bunnyhops, so it was 15 bucks well spent. Here I come Upper Bidwell.

Well, thats enough for now. I'll come back soon.

Well, even though they're noisy when they party, the time that I did ask them to quiet it down, they did. Promptly in fact. So I have to admit that even though they're a partying bunch, at the very least they're understanding...somewhat. You'd figure that if they were truly understanding, they'd move the party inside their place earlier. But hey, they say hello every time I see them outside and come up to strike a conversation if we're both lounging. I guess thats better than most people in Chico.

Well...last year was great. Neighbors were around my age or a little older. This year? Not so much. All under 21 and freakin' party late into thursday night. I'll give them a chance until I get a little grouchy on their asses. They should use their damn cellar...not the garage attached to my unit. I'll have to ask the landlords to make sure the power for that garage is sucking from their meter and not mine...because thats going to raise my bills dramatically. Off to bed.

Ha, for the few readers I have...iTunes is up on the laptop. Even with the disdain I have for all things iWorld, I'm forced to install and use it. Reason being, that I've started using the iPod Nano that I traded with my sister for my Gigabeat. She wanted a gigabeat bad to replace her stolen one...and I needed solid state memory. Seemed like the kinda thing a brother should do for his little sister, at least once in awhile. Anyway, I'd tried using rockbox and it worked for some time, but was buggy and the sound quality wasn't even as good as the original Mac OS that originally came installed on the nano. So I had to use iTunes because Apple saw it fit to screw its users that need to format and redo their iPods. Prior to this horrid decision, one could download a bios updater, and complete the re-install that way. However, for some time now it seems, Apple has forced their users to use iTunes to complete this task. This is what makes me hate the iWorld and all things proprietary. They 'force' their users to utilize some practice or format to get what they want. I'm taking this a bit far because there are some things that are proprietary that I do use, and like to use their products...but I suppose its the fact that even though its proprietary, I don't feel like I was forced to do something. Dig? Its rough. I know this is more like a, 'hey...boohoo for me, whats the deal?' kind of thing. But dammit, its just way I feel about the iWorld.

If it weren't for the fact that I have earbuds that simply rip shreds to the stock iPod earbuds, then I'd have never picked the Nano back up. It makes me wonder sometimes.