steveblock.com » Fun and Games

Redline 925

steve — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 05:38:28 +0000

First update of 2007, sorry for the delay. If you TLDR me I will de-friend.

This one’s about the bike that I bought on EBay, received just before Christmas, and now ride to work. A while back I started looking at the Kansas City Craigslist site every day. I was keeping an eye out for an older road bike that I could clean up and get working wonderfully again. I had sort of decided that those new, gorgeous, awesome, fancy, expensive road bikes were great but maybe were not what I was really looking for.

Anyways, one day I ran across a bike that looked pretty decent. I didn’t buy it, but the guy posting it mentioned something about it being a good candidate for conversion to a “fixie.” At the time I didn’t know what that was, so I looked it up (yay for the internet). I found out that a fixie or fixed or fixed gear conversion or whatever you want to call it is a bike whose drive train has been simplified down to a direct connection between the pedals and the rear wheel. If the pedals are turning, so is the wheel, and vice versa.

This seemed sort of stupid but I was intrigued anyways, so I talked to my friend Boyd about it. He’d ridden fixed bikes before, and he was like “dude go for it.” I kept looking at Craigslist, but this time I was looking for a good candidate for conversion. I think I was sort of at the point where I’d done all kinds of biking and was looking for something new. I mean, I’ve done the whole mountain biking thing, the bike commuting thing (yay college), long distance road biking (yay RAGBRAI), and long distance idiocy (heavy suspension mountain bike 80+ miles in a day).

For whatever reason there are very few bikes on Craigslist here in KC. While I waited for the right one to appear I went to a local independent bike store downtown (Acme, it is awesome) and talked to the lady there for a while. They had all the parts I needed for a conversion, or even just to buy a converted bike outright. Then she showed me a new bike they had, the Redline 9-2-5. It’s a commuter bike, single speed freewheel or single speed fixed, depending on which way the rear wheel is installed. Had fenders and a chain guard, mustache handlebars, and was made of steel. It was definitely a bike for riding, and not for looking pretty. All the same, it did look pretty.

They wanted $600 for it, and I wasn’t ready to buy, but I was intrigued. Big time. Two days later I hit Buy it Now on an EBay auction for one. $400 shipped. OK, whatever. I can handle $400. A week and some later I get the bike, put it together, and promptly drive home for Christmas with the bike on top of my car.

On the Saturday before Christmas I took the bike out for a “short ride” that turned into a ride from my parents’ house at the south end of Ames to Stomping Grounds in Campustown. After having coffee and chatting with Jess, Kyle, and Kandice I realized it was about 4 and I needed to hurry home before it got dark (no lights, minimal reflectors, no helmet, etc). I made it home just as the sun was going down, made a 10 mile day after not riding at all for almost a year, and I was pretty much jelly after that.

For Christmas I got a headlight and taillight, and a floor pump that can handle the funky presta valves on the new bike. I started riding it to work shortly after I got back from break, and have now ridden it to work about 8 times since Christmas. It’s just about as fast as driving, is a better workout, and on the nicer mornings is just plain more enjoyable than driving. The only thing I don’t like is overheating for 20 minutes or so after I get from the cool outside to the warm inside of my building, but I can live with that.

Burning Man Shelter Test Build

steve — Fri, 18 Aug 2006 01:39:54 +0000

I went to the park today to do a test build of the shelter I plan to use for Burning Man. It’s pretty simple but I am using a design that is supposedly playa tested.

I started by pitching my tent as a base footprint, and then went on to building the three hoops that form the main body of the structure. Rebar is used to create the base, and the PVC goes over it.

Driving the First Rebar Anchor

3 Big Ribs

The tent takes up more of the area than I planned, but it’s also not quite at the back edge of the shelter footprint and the vestibule area created by the rain fly is sort of big. In reality the tent shouldn’t take up more than half of the area.

I then attached the sort of shadecloth you might see over a deck. I had a little trouble with uneven tension but I shouldn’t have any trouble dealing with that. I should probably tie down the ends of the cloth better and cable tie the two pieces together.

Shade Cloth Installation

Here’s the essentially finished project. It took about an hour and 15 minutes to set everything up, and 45 minutes to tear down and load back in my car. I plan to get some large pieces of more opaque cloth for additional shade and maybe shelter all the way to ground level.

I am Hot and Tired

Hopefully this works out. Only a few more things to get ready, including fun stuff like toys, gifts, liquor, and surprises. Woo.

Nintendo Wins

steve — Sun, 18 Jun 2006 23:23:20 +0000

Sam has been clamoring for this for days now, so here we go. As some may know and others not, Nintendo released the DS (dual screen) sometime last year or something, maybe it was longer ago than that. Anyways it was sort of gimmicky looking, big, hard to hold, and ugly. Thing is, of the two major portable systems on the market (DS and the Sony PSP) it was the one that actually had software available for it.

So when Nintendo released the DS Lite, which solves the problem of hard to hold and ugly, and makes it look more like an iPod or iBook, I bought one. I have four games: Animal Crossing Wild World, Brain Age, New Super Mario Bros, and Mario Kart DS. They are all great, and I’ve wasted way too much time on this thing since I got it. The best part may be kicking Sam’s ass at Mario Kart over the internet, thanks to Nintendo’s cool WiFi Gaming.

So way to go Nintendo, you win.