Blog entries from January, 2004

Today Damien and I covered:

• Broadmeadows to the Aitken Creek Track near Craigieburn via the Shankland Valley Track
• back down through Roxburgh Park and across to Woodlands Park
• up to the Gellibrand Hill lookout (and airport radar installation)
• down to the plane spotting area at the end of the north-south runway at Melbourne Airport.
• around to the start of the Moonee Ponds Creek Path at the markers at the end of the east-west runway.
• all the way down the path to Fleminton Bridge station.

Overall just under 60 kilometers, although I continued on all the way past Docklands…

For a while now I’ve been considering buying some clipless pedals and shoes, on the way home for work today I bought some. Nothing fancy; Shimano PD-M520 pedals and Specialized Sport MTB shoes…

I put them on the bike at the shop and the ride home was different…

I came back early from Surfmoot this afternoon based on a combination of factors but mostly because Stu got stuck with doing work before Tuesday. So I came back with Jordie and Ben who were always on planning on returning early.

Despite this I thoroughly enjoyed the two nights I was there and I suppose one advantage is that I can now get around to doing some stuff tomorrow…

Riding home from work today was slightly wierd because there was literally no resistance and the indexing was perfect when shifting the rear gears.

I’ve also been poring over the Bicycling Buyer’s Guide that came with my December Bicycle Victoria News and now have some concerns over the prices I was given for 2003 models at Bicycle Superstore yesterday..

Over the past few days my rides to and from work have become increasingly frustrating as the real derailer hasn’t been shifting properly. Thanks to Sheldon Brown‘s page on Derailer Adjustment I attempted to sort it out myself this afternoon.

I eventually discovered that the problem was not with the derailer but that the cable had (by the time i realised) actually parted from the end bit that holds it inside the shifter…

This weekend I was able to find some time to play around with my CompactFlash / IDE Interface card for Apple II computers that arrived before christmas. I only used a 32MB compact flash card, heaps of space compared to two 800k floppy disks, and installed System 6.01 and AppleWorks GS on it.

Since I have three GS system units I think I will sacrifice one in order to make a Mark Twain‘esque box by mounting a floppy drive to the underslide of the cover. Disks will be inserted through the front and it will prevent the use of any slots except for slot 7 which will contain the Compact Flash interface card. I don’t actually have any other cards so it isn’t that much of a big deal. However a ZipGS or TranswarpGS would be nice if I could actually fine one…

I finished reading the tenth book in Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, Crossroads of Twilight, and while it was very good I have one criticism, like Winter’s Heart the pace had dropped off a lot as there are a number of concurrent storylines that each get a signifigant amount of development…