I own three bicycles, two of which are in riding condition. The oldest, and currently not in working order bike, is built around a Trek frameset I bought while a freshman in college some 33 years ago. I added some custom wheels, and bought or repurposed parts to finish the bicycle. I rode it from 1979 until about 1988 when I bought my current road bike, a fat-tube aluminum framed Cannondale SR 900. At $900 in 1988 this was a serious purchase and I’m glad I still have this bike. It’ll be an antique next year at 25 years of age. Two years ago Sibylle and I bought a pair of Giant cross bikes and have enjoyed riding them in and around our neighborhoods since then.
In an effort to get into better shape I bought a magnetic trainer last winter and stuck my Cannondale on it and tried to ride several days a week. I’m heavier than I every was 25 years ago and some of my joints have been injured since then making riding far less comfortable than it used to be. Within minutes of starting to ride my groin is numb and I seem to be developing a rather persistent saddle sore. After reading about the potential long term effects of sitting on one’s perineum I decided I needed to make some changes to bikes or stop riding.
I went to the local bicycle store with the idea of getting a dual platform seat, hoping that it would eliminate the cause of the numbness and saddle sores. What I learned was that most people find these seats uncomfortable as with out a nose you constantly feel like you are falling off the seat and have to hold your self on them. They suggested that I try a bike fitting session, which would make adjustments to my bike that might also improve riding comfort.
This morning over the course of an hour and quarter I had my bike fit session and I am hugely encouraged by the results already. We made several adjustments all aimed at relaxing my riding posture.
##Handlebars Clint started by rolling my handlebars up a few degrees. This made an immediate improvement as I didn’t have to lean quite as far forward to grab the top of the brake hoods.
##Leg angle Next we measured the angle of my knee with my foot at the bottom of the pedal stroke. The optimal range is 25 to 35 degrees. With my original setup I was at 20 degrees on both legs. By lowering my seat a little bit we reached a very comfortable 30 degrees.
##Seat Positioning We next measured the location of my knees in relation to the ball of my feet and the pedal axel. Ideally the knee should be over the ball of the foot which is over the pedal axel. In my case my knees were slightly behind that ideal position, moving the saddle forward a bit corrected this. Clint also adjusted the cleat on my left foot a bit to better align the ball of my foot and the pedal axel.
##Handlebar Stem The final adjustment we made was to change the handlebar stem. The original Cannondale stem had what Clint referred to as “negative angle”. By putting one with a positive angle in its place we raised the bars a bit. Along with the new stem I’m getting new brake cables (the raised height will make the old cables too short) and new handlebar tape (the old likely won’t come off easily after being there for so long).
##Geometry The result of all these changes is an entirely new riding posture. The new geometry felt immediately more comfortable. In a normal training session on my fixed trainer 25 minutes was enough to cause me total numbness and quite a bit of discomfort. This morning I was on the saddle for the better part of an hour with no numbness and my saddle sore wasn’t aggravated. For these reasons I think the new posture will be a huge improvement. I am now looking forward to my next training session and to rides outside later this spring.
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The reviews on the back cover compare Quinn Colson to the likes of Elvis Cole. While I didn’t find this book as enthralling as a good Elvis Cole story, it was good. It will be interesting to see where the author, Ace Atkins, takes the character and story line next.
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I learned about James Church and his Inspector O novels through @timbray on Twitter. The novels are all set in North Korea and they paint an interesting picture of life there. Just as novels offering a glimpse inside the Soviet Union were fascinating to me before that regime fell, novels about the secretive North Korea are also interesting.
It is fascinating what we can learn when we look beyond the accepted understanding of something.
By his explanation, my childless marriage shouldn’t earn the privilege of marriage either, since my wife and I aren’t benefiting society by producing children.
This. This is why we bought a treadmill. (via: Swiss Miss)
A couple of years ago I set up a Flickr photo gallery on Sibylle’s studio site. I had seen nettuts tutorial on creating a slick Flickr gallery with SimplePie.
SimplePie is an RSS feed reader, and the tutorial showed how to incorporate it into your site, along with some JQuery JavaScript and the Thickbox style sheet, to create a photo gallery. Once I had the gallery working all Sibylle had to do was add or remove photos from a particular set on her Flickr account to alter the pictures on her website. It seemed like a good solution at the time but has proven to be cumbersome in actual use.
Today, quite by happenstance I observed Jon Hicks ask on Twitter about a “clean-looking non-Flash way of embedding a Flickr set into a blog post. Much to my delight he soon posted the best response.
Flickrshow produces a very elegant slide show using a Flickr set. There’s a single JavaScript file to link to (or download and refer to on your own host), and a few lines of script to embed in your site to produce the gallery. Compared the RSS-feed method I had used before Flickrshow is lightweight and dirt-simple to setup and use.
It only took me about 5 minutes to cobble together a new photo gallery page for Sibylle’s site use Flickrshow. Sibylle was delighted with the appearance and so this evening I made the switch. You can see it in action for yourself.
Even after all the years I’ve been online I am still astounded by how quickly and completely a single reference to something can change your life.
I’ve been using the TextMate 2 Alpha since its release in December. For the work I do (largely Markdown editing and some minor scripting) it has been stable and a joy to use. TextMate 2 introduces a properties file where you can specify global or project specific properties. Every time I start a new markdown file I get part way through before I remember to visit Edit | Spelling | Check spelling as you type. Today I decided it was time to learn how to set that option once and for all.
A little Googling led me to this TextMate 2 .tm_properties gist. After reading through it a couple times, and through all the comments, I cobbled together the beginnings of a .tm_properties file for my use.
# .tm_properties file from http://gist.github.com/1478685
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Display the name of the home directory
# ---------------------------------------------------------
windowTitle = "$TM_DISPLAYNAME - ${CWD/^.*\///}"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Omit .tm_properties so it doesn't show in the browser
# ---------------------------------------------------------
include = ".htaccess"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Exclude old *.tmproj files
# ---------------------------------------------------------
exclude = "{$exclude,*.tmproj}"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# Variables
# ---------------------------------------------------------
TM_FULLNAME = "Mark H. Nichols"
TM_ORGANIZATION = "zanshin.net"
TM_GIT = "/usr/local/bin/git"
TM_HG = "/usr/local/bin/hg"
# ---------------------------------------------------------
# General Settings
# ---------------------------------------------------------
showInvisibles = true
spellChecking = true
[ text ]
softWrap = false
wrapColumn = 80
softTabs = true
tabSize = 2
[ text.html.markdown ]
softWrap = true
wrapColumn = "Use Window Frame"
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ text.plain ]
softWrap = true
wrapColumn = "Use Window Frame"
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ source ]
softWrap = false
wrapColumn = 80
softTabs = true
tabSize = 2
[ source.plist ]
softTabs = false
tabSize = 4
[ source.tm-properties ]
spellChecking = falseMost of the options I’m setting here are self-explanatory. The windowTitle setting at the top causes the TextMate window title to display the current working directory (CWD) in the title - helpful when you have multiple project windows open at once.
This properties file is stored at the root of my home directory, making it global to all TextMate sessions. You can also have project specific .tm_properties files stored at the root of any given project. Here’s the very simple template I’m using for my projects. It just appends my project name to the window title.
projectDirectory = "$CWD"
windowTitle = "$TM_DISPLAYNAME - Zanshin"You can clone or fork my global .tm_properties file, along with many of my other dot files on Github.
Transcript of a letter written by a former slave to his former master. Politely pointed.
(Warning: Personal site statistics navel gazing ahead.)
My little bitty site continues to grow in popularity. Last week was the first time I had over 1000 visits for the week without some large outside event like a link from Shawn Blanc or Reddit. The average weekly visit count has been slowly increasing for the past few months and has been hovering just under 1000 for several weeks now.
The increased number of visits is icing on the cake for me, as having the site and posting to it are essential to me.