Death of a Seat Clamp

Death of a Seat ClampSpent a few hours yesterday setting up the tandem.

I installed new tires and tubes to replace the 10 year old ones that came on the bike. They were in surprisingly good shape, but why take chances on the possibility of failure due to dry rot when barreling down a hill at 50MPH!

Wrapped the stoker’s handle bars with some new tape. The old stuff was dried out and not very comfortable. I bought enough to do the captains bars too, but didn’t use the second roll. The captain’s handle bar tape was in better shape, just a little faded and it was the same kind as the new stuff I bought, so the setup matched already. Now we have a spare set of tape for any future needs.

Next I installed the cycle computer for the stoker. There was an old Vetta already mounted on the captain’s bars, but my stoker likes to have her own, so she can see how far, fast and long we are riding. One of the joys of tandeming is pedaling like mad down a hill and reaching crazy fast speeds. The stoker cycle computer keeps the captain from having to answer, “How fast we going now?” questions every 15 seconds during descents…

Next I changed out the captain’s saddle from an older Vetta that was there with a newer fangled Flite Titanium with the cutout in the middle for the comfort of your private bits. I then took some measurements off the road bike and duplicated them on the tandem for the captain.

For the stoker on this bike you really can’t do that for handlebar reach, otherwise the handle bars would be in the middle of the captain’s thighs. But sitting a little more upright is not a problem on the back of a tandem, in fact Donna said she even enjoys it more there. Setting up the seat to pedal distance is still important. After our short ride of a couple a weeks ago Donna mentioned that she felt too low, like the seat needed to be higher. When I measured Donna’s road bike and compared it to the tandem they were already really close, hmmm, confusing. Until I realized that the softride beam gives when you sit on it to preload it. Loosened the pivot bolt and pulled up the beam a couple of inches. Not scientific, but a start. On the next ride we see how it feels. It is a one allen bolt adjustment, so I’ll pack the appropriate wrench and we can adjust mid ride if necessary.

This morning we headed out for ride to check and see how well I got it set up. Things went great for the first mile. Then a loud pop came from the back of the bike. I thought her foot had popped out of the pedal, but Donna said no, it felt like under seat. We stopped and dismounted. The seat felt secure but seemed to be leaning a little. When I looked under neath I could see why. One side of the seat clamp was broken. Oh well. We rode carefully back the mile in which we came and parked the tandem. All dressed for a ride we pulled down the single bikes and went for a short 12 mile ride north east of town.

Birth of a Blog

In an effort to foil the referrer spammers who who eating my bandwidth like kudzu covering southern roadside, I pulled the plug on the Movable Type blog and fired up this WordPress site one directory over. Word Press has a couple of referrer spam countermeasures that I hope will help. For now all those who try and hit the old site will get a 404. Take that to your Google Ranking store sucka!

I saved all my old posts and everything, but I’m not sure when (or if) I’ll get around to reposting them. For now my plan is to turn the root entry of the site into a spot with links to my Miata related stuff, photos, mods, to transitions, etc. and this will be the usual drivel about my boring life. I just know that writing something down everyday has become too much of a part of my life to just stop doing it.

Hence this “new and improved” blog. It will be plain for a while until I figure out how to shape these templates to my liking.

Death of a Weblog?

I’m seriously thinking about giving this up. Why you ask? I’ve let the bastards get me down, that’s why?

This morning I was greeted with another “The domain mr-miata.net has reached 80% of its bandwidth limit. Please contact the system admin as soon as possible.” emails. Between yesterday and the first third of today over 5-1/2 Gigs of bandwidth was sucked up by referrer spam from porno sites trying to increase their page rankings by leaving their demon seed behind. That is more than half of my alloted 10 Gigs a month transfer limit.

So I spent an hour or so going through the raw access logs and adding about 20 IP addresses to the deny list. I did this a month ago and now they are back with doubled efforts. For now I seem to have quelled the tide again, but next month they’ll be back, probably with again double the IPs…

Maybe if I tried a different blogging software. I have used Greymatter and Pivot before, don’t remember about GM, but pivot suffered from referrer spam too. I could step backwards and return to blogger, nah, probably not that option. WordPress…maybe. Time to learn another templating system…I don’t know

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

Let’s Hope They Never Got The Message

And aren’t going to get it late, meaning tonight. Last night’s rooting for the Baltimore Orioles didn’t work out so well, they still lost to the Damn Yankees, which placed the Red Sox a full game behind in the East. I’m hoping the O’s don’t get my wishes for a win a day late, because they are playing the FRS right now.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

Perfect Night Gone Awry

A Red Sox loss and a Yankee win last night put the FRS into their usual American League Eastern Division spot, 2nd place. The past couple of years that was still OK because they had a good enough record to get into the playoffs via the Wildcard route. This year that may not be the case because the Cleavland Indians have a better record than the Red Sox and if the season ended today the BoSox players could break out the fishing gear.

It is not over by a long shot (I tell myself), there are still 10 games to play in the season and ten games ago the Red Sox were in 1st place by 4 games. A turn around is possible, we only trail the Yanks by a 1/2 game and Cleavland’s hold on the Wildcard is only 1 game…

But the long-time Boston fan in me is absolutely positive we are out of the playoffs now though. A co-worker brought me in his copy of the DVD Fever Pitch and I figured what better way to drown my sorrows than to watch a romantic comedy movie that uses the Red Sox’s glory year as a backdrop. Well, it was a nice thought, but I left the movie on my desk…

The FRS have an night off, so their is no game on the radio to listen to, so I guess I will have to make do with listening to the Baltimore broadcast of the Orioles-Yankees game and rooting for the birds.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

1 + 1 = 0

We recently had a city council election here in Aiken where there were 4 people running for the two open At-Large spots. It was really a Republican primary, but seeing as there were no Democrats interested in the offices, it turned out to be the actual election and every registered voter was eligible to vote. The hot button issue in the election was the unchecked growth in the city, particularly the south side.

As it shook out, the four candidates became aligned into two groups of two, one pair for limiting the growth some what and one pair for encouraging all the growth possible. As usual, quite a few front yards sprouted campaign signs and every lawn that had signs, had them in pairs representing one group or the other.

Usually when a candidate wins an election, the people who had signs up for the winner leave their signs up proudly. It could be to let us know how smart they are for backing a winner or it could be just rubbing the losing supporter’s noses in it. Heck, there are still a few Bush-Chenney bumper stickers on local cars…

How it happened I’ll never know, especially if the sign groupings were actually representative of the voting intent, but in the election, one candidate from each group won a seat. Within a couple of days after the election, 99.99% of the campaign signs were gone. I guess no one felt like admitting they were a half assed political prognosticator.

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299

Come On Baby, Boot!

While trying to swap out the secondary drive on the PC with the former main HD I discovered that my Dell will not finish booting to a DOS disk if there is a USB card reader plugged into a USB port. Stumped me for about an hour. Tried 48,000 permutations of jumper settings on both drives and which connector on which drive and in a fit of desperation power cables to the drives.

(Before you ask, I needed to to boot to a DOS disk so I could unpartition my old 30G HD and make it one big back-up drive.)

Started down, still down.
Miata Top Transitions since 01/01/05: 299