Testing 1 2 3
This is a quick test of emailing posterous to see what happens to my post.
A photo?
The front tire that came on my trek cobia likes to get holes. It's quite good at finding thorns. For a long time I haven't used them because I wouldn't be able to finish a ride without having to fix a flat.
I have other tires (nano raptors) on my stans wheels (tubeless), but after talking with Matt at IT&B in Honolulu, I decided to try out stan's (no tubes) sealant in a tube.
I just cut a small hole, just large enough to fit the tip of the 2oz bottle, in a tube, I squirted in the sealant and then put a regular patch on it. I mounted it all up, and took it for a spin.
Then, for fun, I stuck it with a thumb tack. When I pulled the tack out, it was definitely losing air. I spun the wheel around a couple times, there was a little bit of white foam, and it stopped. All good!
And, by the way, doing this was way, way easier than getting my other wheels setup tubeless. I don't have compressed air and it was very frustrating trying to get the tire to seal.
The downside here is that stan's sealant is supposed to only last for 3-6 months, or something like that, so this may end up being a way to go through tubes faster, just without flats.
I thought I might be able to improvise.
I went to our local walmart and found a medicine dispenser syringe thingie that looked like it might work. It actually worked really, really well. I had to be a bit careful with the loading and lining up the syringe on the valve stem, but I had a minimal of spillage, and successfully inject 2 syringefuls of sealant into the tire. Yay!
I did the little shake-and-rotate-and-repeat dance to try and get the new sealant to where the slow leak is. I still have not resorted to the soapy water to try and find it. Before it was so slow that I just needed to give it a little air every other day. My other tire seems to be just as inflated as when I left it 2.5 weeks ago. I didn't actually measure the pressure, though.
The only downside to going tubeless, so far, is that I don't want to change the tires since getting them inflated the first time is such a PITA.
Met Yoshi at starbucks today to hang out and work. I rode my bicycle down to town, and locked it in the parking lot.
When I came out to get it, there were several youths near where I'd locked it. (It was sorta a grassy area there.)
"Hey, cool bike, there! Is that a carbon fork?" - one of the tattood fellas.
"Yeah" - me.
"Must be really light!"
"That's a really nice bike! Must be expensive!" - another of the youths.
I always fail to engage in conversations when I have a chance like this. That's why I have a blog. :)
So, I don't have any tattoos myself, but amongst these guys, I believe they all had multiple tattoos. If they're paying standard rates, I'm guessing that some of them have spent more on tattoos than I spent on my fancy carbon fork.
I bought this bike used for $600, and then I'm afraid I sort of "went to town". New carbon fork, stem, seat post, seat, brakes, and new wheels. I haven't done a detailed inventory, but I think I spent nearly $2000 in all on this bicycle.
Is it an expensive bike? I guess so.
But here's the thing. Just a bit ago my son had a small fender bender in my car. Good thing I had insurance. I think that cost the insurance company about $3000, and me my $600 deductable. A few months later, there are other problems with this car. Another $2600. A single repair on my car cost more than my "expensive" bike.
My car has about 75000 miles on it. If we assume about 25 MPG, that works out to about $12,000 on gasoline at today's price. And don't forget the $17,000 plus interest that I spent to but the car in the first place.
I think most people think bicycles are "expensive" because they just hang in the garage. Yes, that's a waste of money. Not because the bike is "expensive". Bicycles are incredibly cheap. Even the expensive ones. You just have to actually use it.
I read a lot about people on bicycles getting yelled at and harassed by people in automobiles, but as far as I can recollect, today was my first. And I got yelled at twice.
I was biking home, 772 ft climb over 1.9 miles for a solid 7% grade, BTW, slowly and a car passed. Some guy was yelling out the window of the car, and when I looked he was looking right at me, so clearly he was yelling at me. Too bad I have no idea was he was saying.
A bit later, a car was going down the hill, and the driver (not the passenger this time) yelled at me as he passed. Again, he was clearly addressing me, and again, I have no clue what he said.
From the facial expressions and tone, I don't think it was "hey, rock on!" or anything positive like that. I suspect they each thought they were being clever in insulting me in some way.
I picked up a 2000 mA battery at office max that will charge my cell phone. I wanted to have a place to stash the battery, so I decided to get a revelate gastank. When I ordered it I went ahead and grabbed a small tangle bag as well. It's actually just a smidge large, but it fits, in my medium niner EMD.
I had to remove my bottle rack, and relocate my blackburn u-lock slightly in order to get the tangle in. Previously the lock mount was at the top of the seat tube, now it's at the bottom of the seat post.
Today I actually went for a little ride around town, trying out my tires in tubeless mode for the first time. No flats. :)
It looks like I'm now fully tubeless.
I got Stan's stock crest wheelset a while ago, but never attempted to do tubeless. The other day I wanted to go for a ride and came to find I had a flat. I fixed it, but later during the ride had to keep inflating the tire to get home because I could not find & repair another leak that I acquired on the ride. That day I decided it was time to try tubeless.
When I went to the Bike Factory in Honolulu to pick up my new Ergon PC2 Pedals, I also grabbed a bottle of Stan's Tire Sealant. I explained to Carl what was up, and he said it should be "idiot proof" since I had Stan's wheels (already taped, already had valve to fit in the wheel).
The first wheel went pretty good. It was a little tricky getting it to inflate. The trouble is that it's impossible to get the bead of the tire fully out of the groove. One bead was fully up on the wheel, left in that position from the tube. If you can get the bead to touch the outer portion of the wheel and get a bit of a seal, then you can pump air in and get it to fully seal. I used two or three large binder clips to hold/push the bead over far enough so that I could inflate it. First wheel done.
For the second wheel, it was a bit harder. Again, I had one bead fully on the wheel, but the second bead was harder. I attempted to use a CO2 cartridge, but that didn't work at all. Eventually I got it inflated, but it would not seal around the bead. I would pump it up and it would look ok, but there were small leaks around the bead, bubbling white sealant. I figured it would seal up eventually, if I left it and pumped it up again later.
I found later that it was putting out a gray/green fluid. It looked like diluted oil or something. I don't know what it was. It did not look like the white Stan's sealant.
After a day, and it not sealing, I decided that I needed to take the tire off, clean it out, and try again. I took the tire fully off, soaked up the sealant that was in the tire with paper towels, and dried off the wheel and the tire.
I put the tire back on and attempted to inflate it, but got nowhere. I went and grabbed my leaky tube, put it in and inflated it. After removing the tube, I had one bead fully engaged. Then I spent at least an hour and a half attempted to get the other bead engaged, and/or to inflate the tire.
Again, the problem was getting the bead up against the wheel to create any seal so that air would stay in the tire. Five large binder clips were insufficient. I drove down to the local office max and bought two boxes of large binder clips. I didn't know how many I needed but I knew I didn't want to go get more later.
I think I used somewhere from eight to ten binder clips to push/hold the bead up against the wheel. Again, this is not seated or anything, just enough to create a bit of a seal so that air pressure can build up a bit and push the bead out of the groove and up onto the rim.
Having enought binder clips, I got the job done within ten minutes. The tire seems to have sealed immediately this time. No bubbling around the bead, no ooky gray goop (which I still don't know what it was).
Hopefully I can actually go for a ride soon.
Everybody is familiar with the notion that an infinite number of monkeys given an infinite number of typewriters and enough time would almost certainly produce the complete works of Shakespeare.
Before I talk about monkeys, let me discuss large numbers.
I was at the shore today eating my subway sandwich watching the waves crash against the rocks, and it occurred to me that the time it takes for waves to turn solid rocks into sandy beaches is incomprehensible to me. Looking up the age of Oahu I find that this island is 3 million years old. That seems pretty straight forward. 3,000,000. That's not too bad.
Let's compare that to my lifetime. For simplicity, let's assume that I live 100 years. So that's 30,000 lifetimes. Or maybe to recorded history, about 5,000 years. So the age of Oahu is about 600 times the length of recorded history. Imagine all of what we know about human kind (a bit more than two times as long as since Christ came to visit the first time) happening 600 times.
So, it's takes somewhat less time than 600 times the entire known history of mankind to make an island and put sand on the beach. I would still say that, in a sense, this is incomprehensible to me. I've made some comparisons and done some math, but for me to really comprehend that span of time, for it to mean something that I might actually be able to experience directly, it's pretty tough. I have trouble remembering my own childhood, and I'm not even 50 years old yet.
How about something really big? The age and size of the known universe? According to wikipedia, the fount of all knowledge, the age of the known universe is about 13.75 billion years. Let's be conservative and call it 10 billion. That's more than 3,000 times the age of Oahu. Another data point from wikipedia: "The number of atoms in the observable universe is close to 1080" That's a number that my calculator can deal with, but it's really, really big. Theoretically I could write out a 1 followed by 80 zeros, but it's not really a number I can wrap my head around. It's beyond me to imagine that many of anything.
I suspect that when people think about the "infinite" monkeys & typewriters, they picture something on the order of 100, or 1,000 monkeys. I think I can sort of imagine 1,000 monkeys. Maybe some people can imagine 1,000,000 monkeys. So generally people hear the thing about infinite monkeys and chuckle because it just seems preposterous. Even if we replaced every human on Earth with a monkey, you're still not going to get the works of Shakespeare out of those monkeys. No matter how many monkeys you can imagine, it's incomprehensible that they could produce anything near the works of Shakespeare.
But 1,000,000 falls far, far short of infinity. 10 billion is way, way less than infinity. Infinity is really big.
Here's the kicker: The total works of Shakespeare have already been "randomly" produced by something far smaller and simpler than an infinite number of monkeys, and far quicker than an infinite amount of time. Our known universe already produced the complete works of Shakespeare.
The size and age of the known universe are both finite. They're not infinite. I think we can all agree on this. (The key here is the known universe. I'm not talking about anything beyond what we can observe.) The known universe is comprised of a finite number of atoms, tossed around with a few laws of physics. We have not plumbed all the mysteries of physics, but I think we can all agree that an atom is pretty simple compared to a full blown monkey.
I guess my point, if I have one, is that we fool ourselves when we try to think about an infinite number of anything. If a finite number of atoms in a finite amount of time can produce everything we currently find interesting, how can we pretend to imagine what an infinite number of monkeys might or might not produce?
To my 27 followers:
I've created a "mobile photo blog" to which I hope to consistently post photos while out and about. It's at
I invite you to visit there, and follow if you're interested. Also, be aware that the exact same stuff will show up in my twitter stream, and other places.
