Finally doing that bike upgrade

My bike is pretty cheap, I only paid $300 for it. It's OK but even the guys at the store said "those wheels don't have 10,000 miles in them." The rear wheel didn't even have 2,000 in it; I rebuilt it a couple of years ago and it's been solid since then. The front wheel is now at 12,000 miles, and since the front wheel supplies most of the braking power, it's starting to show its age.

The front wheel is still as-shipped. It'd be fine except the rim is about the cheapest thing they could find, single-walled, thin aluminum, and the bike has rim brakes. Combine that with the gravel and mud that I ride through often enough, and the sand that gets on the brake pads turn them into grinding pads. The rims are about halfway worn through.

I'm using high-end brake pads (Koolstops, though I switched to Nashbar replacable pad brakes and they work about as well as koolstops). Even so, the braking is not really good when there's ice, and is a little weird when it's wet (tends to slip for a couple of seconds then get grabby for a couple of seconds before settling down. Also the rim is getting critically thin, and at 80 PSI, the rim could just blow out at some point and that would be...bad.

Anyway, I finally did what I'd been thinking about for about 2 years; ordered up a new hub/rim/spokes, and a disc brake setup for the front. Luckily the forks already have the mounts to support the caliper. I got the new 2008 Avid BB7 brake system, which is mechanical rather than hydraulic. From what I understand, mechanicals are really pretty good these days, and it's one less thing for me to have to learn about. Hydraulics work great except if they get a drop of water in the system in the winter, they can fail. Also they were pretty cheap; the caliper and rotor was only about $60, and I could use the brake lever I have already with just a new cable.

I bought a rim that can be used for rim brakes too if the disc thing doesn't work out.

So sometime in the next couple of weeks I need to sit down in front of the TV like I did a couple of years ago and build myself a new wheel. The warm weather isn't fooling me; it's just trying to catch us even more offguard when that early snowstorm comes. Although, pretty soon it'll be too late for an "early" snowstorm.

Well, neat!

While over at my mother-in-law's house a week or so ago, J's sister said she had an old laptop that was just an old hunk of junk that she didn't want anymore. She was going to throw it out, but it had patient info on it from her PT practice, so she wanted to know if I would security-wipe the drive for her and then dump the laptop, or use it if I wanted to. Sure, I said. I didn't have a lot of hope, usually when people are dumping old laptops, I'm used to them being really old.

J brought it home today. Wow, it's a Pentium 4 1.6 GHz Micron, 20GB HD and DVDROM, 15" 1440x1050 display, USB 1.1 and Firewire. The RAM was only 256M, I dumped in a 128M SODIMM I had sitting around from when I updated my other machine. I popped in a PCMCIA wireless card, security wiped the drive and installed Ubuntu 7.10. Got the VPN client from work installed. It's only USB 1.1 which is a bummer but hey, it's a free laptop and IMHO pretty damn functional. Heck, I could live with this as my only machine, assuming a 500GB external drive (I should get a firewire enclosure). OK, I'd want to dump in a little more RAM, but I could live with it as is.

I just need to find a dial-up service that I can use on the road and I'll have an emergency backup "call in to work" machine. I had a laptop almost identical, but my daughter commandeered it and I probably don't even want it anymore. Besides, it's kind of falling apart.