I Got A Rock

The back way out of my apartment complex is a steep gravel and dirt hill that leads down to a paved, curbless street of a well-to-do subdivision. That street is downhill, this one less steep but quite long. The little traffic in the area means I get the opportunity to fly down that hill, which ends in a 90 degree right turn I need to make. Last year, I attempted to record this initial stretch with an iPod touch strapped to the handlebars of my bike.  Here is the Ed Wood-ian results.

Now, this was recorded on a bulky mountain bike with big, underinflated tires and the ubiquitous and completely unnecessary shocks on the front forks. Plus, since this was not too long into my commuting on bike, I was riding the brakes a lot of the way down. Suffice it to say, this video doesn’t convey the sense of speed, nor does it accurately portray the possible top speed I can reach on this hill now that I have a much lighter, faster bike. Nor does it convey the added confidence I have as a rider with a little more experience under my belt and a helmet on my head.

It was on Thursday last week that I headed down this hill, happy-go-fucking-lucky as ever. Sure, it was cold as shit, but I was bundled up well and I had my newly rigged pannier filled with my fishing gear and I was looking forward to stopping at the local pond.

Feeling cocky, I started my ride as usual. With no traffic in sight, I scooted into the oncoming lane going downhill so I could cut the corner tighter and turn into the proper lane at the bottom of the hill. As it happened - as it was supposed to happen - things did not go according to this plan and I completely lost the angle on my turn. This was pure rider error. I went screaming through the apex without having braked nearly enough and was forced onto the shoulder of the road in the oncoming lane after making my turn.

Now, I don’t know if this area is unincorporated or not, but the roads do give that impression. There are no traffic lines or markings, no curbs, no actual “shoulder,” either, just grass, rocks, miscellaneous debris and a drainage ditch.

As I went careening off my course and started heading towards that drainage ditch, the idea of dumping my bike into the stagnant puddles and loose gravel seemed rather unappealing, so I did everything in my power to keep the bike upright on the loose terrain I suddenly found myself in, and, to my credit, I did just that. I didn’t have to lay it down, didn’t go flying over the handlebars, didn’t end up in a ditch.

I did, however, manage to hit a rock. The impact was hard and loud. I felt the jarring transfer from my front tire, up the carbon fork, through the handlebars into my hands and all the way up my arms into my shoulders. I knew that it was bad, but my immediate concern was that I had a flat and would have to head back home and wake up the wife to drive me to work.

If only.

After making it up to the stop sign before my next turn, I have my front tire a squeeze and noticed it was holding air. I didn’t hear any hissing and all seemed well. I went about my merry way, assuming I had dodged a bullet. After my next turn is a long, primarily flat stretch before another steep hill up to the next intersection and stop sign. It was here that I first noticed things didn’t feel great in my front wheel. It was riding, but looking down I could see it clearly wasn’t true. There was also a noticeable bump in the ride repeating at regular intervals. This when I started swearing aloud on my ride.

I rode past the pond, not in the mood to fish and knowing I might need the time in case there was some sort of catastrophic hardware failure on the rest of my ride. Feeling pot committed at this point, though, I pressed on, hoping the damage was minor and repairable.

I arrived at work about 10 minutes ahead of my start time, but there was already a customer waiting to pick up, so I started right in before getting a chance to make my coffee, eat my yogurt or even change my clothes. The morning went on at that pace until lunchtime. When it became apparent I would not have any work during my coworker’s lunch hour, I began to inspect the damage closely. My findings were not good.

3 or 4 banged up spokes and a rim that was cracked on both sides at one of the spoke nipples.

I suddenly felt grateful I made it the rest of the way to work without the rim completely failing and sustaining damage to my fork…or to me, for that matter.

So now I am impatiently awaiting the paltry check Kane County was supposed to send me for my 7 days of jury duty in March that I should have received 2 weeks ago so I can replace the wheel, as, apparently, disc brake wheels like mine are not nearly as easy to find and not nearly as cheap to replace as a standard wheel, of course.

So not only am I pissed off at myself for fucking up my bike, but I am really bummed about not being able to ride it, too. It’s pretty great.

Crack In The Universe

The crime scene.

Prime suspect.

Journey

Last night I finished Journey, the final game in ThatGameCompany’s PSN exclusive “game” “trilogy.” I quote both game and trilogy separately because the three games are completely unrelated, so they aren’t really a trilogy and, according to some, the first two games (flOw and Flower) aren’t even really games at all. Journey is certainly the “gamiest” of the three, wherein the player has direct control of a humanoid avatar that has the ability to do things like run and jump.

It is at about this point that I must fully disclaim that the long history of lazy, trope-heavy reviewing of things like music, movies, books and video games create a problem here, because describing Journey is something in which bullshitty words like “ethereal”  and “artsy” could be put to good use, but years of abuse and misuse by review writers have sucked any and all meaning from many of the words that could be aptly used to explain Journey, so I will just do my best to explain what I personally liked about the game.

Like flOw and Flower, Journey is completely devoid of any predefined narrative or story. There is no text or dialog, no prompts or tutorials. Your character is unnamed, as are the characters you play with in the anonymous, seamless multiplayer. The only way to communicate with the your online partner is through a single pressure sensitive button press that causes your avatar to “chirp.” Online players enter your world randomly and if you become separated for a large distance or amount of time, the player drops out of your game. It is impossible to be trolled in Journey, as far as I can tell. The “puzzles” in the game can all be solved solo, but having a second player, particularly at the end of the game, makes for a much, much more emotionally resonant experience.

The game looks stunning, and an amazing amount of work and detail obviously went into created a game world that feels barren. The music, which I am listening to as I type this, is beautiful and matches up well with the environments and the action.

I think, perhaps, what I like most about Journey, though…what I find most ambitious about it, is it’s ambiguity. Flower, which was also beautiful and creative, had an unavoidable, preachy overtone to it that I just found myself unable to ignore. Journey, for me at least, is left completely open to player interpretation. The blanks in the story – who you are, how you got there, where you are going – are filled in completely in your own mind. If you are like me, those things never even enter in to it, though. I took the title to it’s logical extreme and just went on a Journey from the start to the end of the game.

There is one moment in this game with no story that I could spoil, but I will not. I will only say that, nearing the conclusion of the game, there was a moment where, had the credits begun rolling, I would have either wept or stood up off the couch and applauded or possibly even both. To become attached to the unexplained journey of nameless character with no backstory in 90 minutes of gameplay to the extent which I did displays a brilliant level of craftsmanship at work on the part of ThatGameCompany.

Journey is not for everyone. I don’t give a flying fuck about the “games as art” discussion. I have no horse in that race. I like art. I like games. Sometimes, even if it is only by virtue of the majority of games being completely antithetical to the idea of “art,” there is an overlap where a game can create the same guttural, emotional response that great music, books and films can. Sometimes it is because of stunning visuals, sometimes it is because the story is excellent and sometimes it is the catharsis of one particularly moment in a game. Journey has all of those rolled up in to one short, $15 package.

D.I.Y. Pannier – Or – How I Spent No Money & Learned To Love Cable Ties

Since the weather and fishing have both been cold recently, it’s time for another bike-centric post. Tomorrow I am riding to work and my goal tonight was to get the derailers adjusted to where I could use all the rear sprockets in tandem with my middle front sprocket. The problem with these adjustments, I’ve found, is that you can’t really do it with the bike just leaning against the wall. You have to be pedaling it, but if you’re riding it you can’t really pay close enough attention to diagnose where the problem is. I needed a stand, but, yeah, I don’t have a fucking stand for working on my bike. I do, however, have a long length of rope and a garage door, so, problem solved.

This is my idea of a bike stand.

So, with it on the “stand” I was able to fiddle with it to where it was shifting up and down fine on the rear cluster, so as long as my dumbass doesn’t go fucking with the front derailer tomorrow, I should be ok on that front.

Next up…I wanted to come up with a more elegant solution to carrying shit than a the goddamn plastic Target bag that opened up and sent my socks and poo-poo undies into the wind on my ride home Tuesday night. The new duffel bag we have is way too big, but, my old tackle bag, which has just been laying around in the garage collecting dust, seemed like it would make a nice saddlebag.

Now, since I don’t yet have a nice rear rack with brackets running down the side, I needed something to prevent the bag from bouncing into the spokes once it has a load in it. That was simple enough. An old plastic hanger.

I went with a magenta-colored hanger because it is sexy looking.

After this picture was taken, I added a piece of stiff metal wire running from the unsecured point of the hanger up to the back of the rack just as added support.

Then, mounting the old Chattahoochie Chomper was just a matter of poking some holes in the bag and fastening with my new favorite piece of D.I.Y. gear – the cable tie. I have absolutely no recollection of where I got the bag of cable ties I have been using, but thank fuck I got them, because they are proving invaluable with the bike. It ain’t pretty, it’s only going to be removable by cutting it off and we’ll see how she rides under a full load in real world conditions, but considering the $0.00 cost and 30 minute time investment, I am pretty happy with the results.

It looks real decent here when it was hanging loose.

Completed look, after cinching it down, fastening it on the sides and bottom and throwing my tools in.

Buoyed by the “success” of that project, I decided it was time to mount the speaker I have been using for my iPod somewhere a little more efficient than on the bungee cords on the rear rack behind my ass where I could never hear the music.

CABLE TIES TO THE RESCUE!

The speaker housing has two hooks on the back that were originally for a purse-like strap to carry it by. I fastened those two spots to the flat portion of the bar next to the brakes. Then I loosely put a cable tie on the the perpendicular portion of the headset that the bar mounts on, as there is also a convenient velcro belt-loop on the back of the speaker (I utilized this belt loop for my Bananaphone Halloween costume) and then velcroed that loop through the cable tie. Tightened up everything, cut em off and now I have a speaker right in front of me, where I can actually hear it.

Speaking of which, for reasons unbeknownst to me, I have been listening to Sunny Day Real Estate’s “Diary” while I typed this up. Someone, for the love of god, text or tweet me sometime around 7 AM with a reminder to put this album on my iPod, so I can listen to it on my ride. This was always a great cold weather album for me for some reason.

Which brings me to my last, but certainly not  least, point. The cold. The WGN Weather App is saying it is going to be 34 in the morning when I leave. With wind and speed, that feels way fucking colder. So I asked my wife for a favor. I asked her to knit me a rectangle that I could wear under my helmet over my ears. My regular winter hats are way too chunky to fit under my helmet, and I can’t do a scarf because it makes my breath fog up my glasses. My loving wife, the talented knitter she is, knitted me up a damn fine rectangle in like 10 minutes, so now I will have warm ears tomorrow morning.

Plus, the thing kind of makes me look like Pipi Longstocking, which makes me think of this:

Ok. It is fucking late. I have to be up in 5 and a half hours for this ride, so, I am going to slam the rest of this Jack Daniels, hit the sack and then go to bed.

Tight lines, everyone.

More like deFAILleur.

With the assistance of my friends, I think the bike I purchased was a great choice, and I have been very pleased with it. It has easily handled everything I have thrown it’s way. Rocky hills, potholes, grass, dirt, gavel, mud…I’ve had no problems with any of them. Even the assembly, which I was worried about, was a piece of cake, and I was able to put it all together in under an hour at work.

I’ve already accessorized a bit. Added a Honda logo I found on the side of the road to my helmet. Mounted a speaker so I can listen to music on my commute. Changed the seat (can’t yet bring myself to refer to it as a saddle) to one that is easier on my bony little ass. Added a seatpost rack so I can bring things like a French press to work so I can now have a nice cup of coffee with my post-ride Greek yogurt and banana. I’ve got a list of “to buy” items like fenders and panniers and a study lock so I can make more use of it than just work and back, too. Riding this thing is a blast.

Until this point, I have had one, and only one problem with the bike itself, and it is a familiar problem. As a matter of fact, it is one of the same problems that lead me down the “new bike” rabbit hole to begin with.

Gears. Shifting. Derailleurs. Chainrings. Cables.

Ya see, I bought this sweet 24 speed bike because I live in the Fox River valley and my commute is quite hilly. The old mountain bike I was using last year had a quirky little problem where only 2/3rd of the gearing was usable, which meant I had to choose whether I wanted the highest top speed or the ability to just spin in low gear before I started riding, as I couldn’t shift front chainrings on the fly. I eventually found a “solution” to this problem at the end of last season. It amounted to just kicking the derailleur until it did what I wanted.

See, the problem is, the way shifters and derailleurs and chains and gears and shit work on bikes…it makes no good goddamn sense to me. I am not completely incompetent when it comes to the workings of mechanical things. By no stretch am I an engineer, but, I am also not completely helpless, and I often pride myself on being able to figure out how or why things work and being able to fix them when they break. Changing gears on a fucking bike, though, seems to be my white whale.

I thought that, since I was spending a nice chunk of change on a nice bike, this problem wouldn’t crop up. After all, the Schwinn I borrowed when I started riding was clearly a $100 Wal*Mart clearance bike. That had to be the reason for the failure, right?

Out of the box, freshly assembled, the shifting on my Gravity worked just fine. For whatever reason, though (I quite literally cannot recall why), I started tinkering with things and now I am back in a place where I just leave the chain on the middle front chainring so I at least have a little speed and a little spin, but, truthfully, the biggest problem is just not being able to figure out what the hell I am doing wrong in trying to fix it.

I spent a good hour working on that one single problem last week, and when nothing seemed to fix it, I just left it on the biggest gear so I’d have that high top speed/hell of quad workout. This morning, however, with 34 degree temps and a steady 10-15 MPH breeze in my face, I was slogging and decided to press my luck and drop it back down the the middle gear. After some clicking and slipping, the cable running to the derailleur went completely slack and the derailleur sprung back all the way down to the smallest gear, leaving me spinny spinny. Cold and frustrated, I rigged it up in a parking lot to get me the rest of the way to work, and I am about to go try and fix it better as soon as I am done with this post (yeah work has been pretty slow, btw), but I’m pretty sure that, come paycheck time, I am just going to have to swallow my pride and take it to a shop and have a professional make it work properly.

The whole system seems quite simple. It’s a damn cable and spring attached to a lever. The position of the lever determines whether or not there is tension on the cable which, in turn, is pushing the chain out to the big gear or the spring pulls it back to the small gear. Rinse, repeat. So why, then, has adjusting it properly escaped me?

It’s like torrents. I know how to use bittorrent to download files. It know what to look for in seed/leecher ratio. I know how to adjust the torrent file in my client to increase the speed of the download and upload. But how the fuck the actual file gets downloaded from all the other users to me? No fucking clue. I just always assume it’s magic, and I assume the same magical, mystical forces are at work with changing gears on my fucking bike. As we all know, when man is unable to explain something, it’s easiest to just assume it is magic or demons or god or ghosts or angels, and since I know demons, god, ghosts and angels don’t exist, that just leaves magic, right?

Another Smallmouth

On the way home from work this morning I stopped at my not-so-secret Fox River spot below the Kimball Street dam. The water level, flow and clarity were all down dramatically compared to earlier in the month. The mid-steam rock piles I like to target are fishable now and after a 10 casts or so I found a dance partner, this beauty, who fought like the carp I got last month. A lot of runs, took a fair amount of line, made a couple dramatic jumps. Definitely not the biggest fish I’ve hooked but she certainly didn’t know that.

That Plano box is about 11" long.

Picture quality inversely proportional to fight in this fish.

 

 

[LINK] Fun With Maps

Chris over at CB Fishes is putting together some maps. This is a very cool idea and could be quite helpful to today’s “always connected” anglers. Wanted to throw up a link to show him some support and hopefully inspire some of the people I fish with (myself included) to start charting familiar waters.

Fun With Maps

BIKE DAY

My bike has finally arrived! I use the word finally as if to say that it was a long, arduous wait, but actually the ordering and delivery process was all excellent, save for the delivery getting pushed back from Friday the 30th to Monday the 2nd.  Considering I ordered the bike from Bikes Direct on Tuesday 27th, it didn’t ship (from Jacksonville, FL) until the 28th, having it loaded up and ready for my inaugural commute one week later is pretty damn impressive.