Bicycles

Both of my boys have taken an interest in bicycles recently. We have pulled out Mom's and my old bikes and they have been riding wheels off them. My old mountain bike has been sidelined with its' second flat.

Mom's road bike will not shift. It has Shimano indexed shifters that are integrated with the brake levers. The levers move, they pull the cables, the derailers move, but the index does not not click (latch), so as soon as you release the lever they go back to where they were. Wrote to Sheldan "Bicycle Guru" Brown (link to his site is in my "Web Sites of the Month" list) about the problem. He recommended soaking the shifters in WD-40. I had already tried that and it didn't help. So I went to Lucille's Tool Store to look for a tool to remove the special nut on the back of the shifter. I found a pair hefty snap ring pliers for $3.50 that worked pretty well when I clamped them in the vise. Not that is has done me any good. I managed to take the shifters apart, but they are built like a watch. There must be fifty pieces, and half of them are spring loaded. I doubt whether I will ever find the time to master the intricacies of reassembling it.

Sheldon also said that these Shimano RSX shifters are junk. So to get the bike operational again in a timely manner, it looks like I will be buying new shift levers for it. That will run between one and two hundred dollars, depending on the shifter and whether I have the bike shop do it, or do it myself.

John has his eye on mountain bike and Ross is looking for a single speed. Ross and I spent some time looking at bikes yesterday and building a spreadsheet to compare various models. Ross started it Excel and then I imported it into Google documents. We worked on it last night, added pertinent information we thought important. I "shared" it. We shall see how that works out.

Right now our pick hit is the Kona Paddy Wagon, which just so happens was the first bike we looked at last week at Bike Gallery in Beaverton. Interesting that most of the single speed bikes have steel frames (cromo, or Chrome Moly) as opposed to aluminum, whereas most bicycles these days have aluminum frames. Kind of a retro thing all around. Except for the drop bars.

Web Sites for the month

I really like the bicycle messenger video. Part of the reason is the soundtrack. I tried another, similar video on You Tube, but I found the music obnoxious so I quit it.

Uniqlock I got from "Coding Horror". Most of the rest come from my family and friends from various discussions we have been having.

I came across S.F.V.I.S.B.F. in "Ol' Skool Rodz", a "blue collar" hot rod magazine I picked up at the store the other day. I really enjoyed the video and the magazine.

What do I do with this list at the end of the month? Keep it in the layout? There does not seem to be a way to save it off without having to copy each entry by hand. I suppose I could just rename it and move it to the bottom. That way I can postpone having to deal with it for a year anyway.

What, How & Do

There are three kinds of jobs in the world: jobs where you decide what to do, jobs where you figure out how to do it, and jobs where you do the work. Most people want blue collar jobs, jobs where you just do the work. They have learned how to do something and just want a chance to do that job. Some people have more curiosity and enjoy figuring out how to make things. These are your scientists and engineers. And then there are those who decide what everyone else is going to do. Are we going to war, or are we going to enter trade negotiations? Are we going to build economy cars or big trucks? Are we going to bet on red? Or black?

I have been under the impression that there are good managers and there are bad managers. Now I am not so sure. I am thinking it may be more a matter of incompatible people. Situations where the workers are more competent than the manager is fairly typical. So why is the incompetent person the manager? Bravado, maybe. They know they are incompetent at doing the work, so if they stick with that, which is where most people would really rather be, they will end up getting fired. So they promote themselves to other people, and eventually somebody listens and they get put in charge of something.

Or maybe it is just a matter of being able to put up with people you don't like.

Too Busy to Write

Sad state of affairs? I was really enjoying writing, but it did take time. I have no end of topics to write about, but not much time to spend on it. Things may lighten up soon, so I will be able to finish my epic about our trip to Chicago, and more about life in suburbia.

Movies

"Lonely Hearts" with John Travolta and Salma Hayek
"Resistance"

"Lonely Hearts" with John Travolta and Salma Hayek
Well done, but sad, true story of a conman and his crazy girlfriend, Salma. You could tell she was crazy, they told you so, and she could be violent and unfeeling, but I never got the uncomfortable feeling that crazy movie characters usually give me.

"Resistance" A variation on the World War II love story behind enemy lines. The war movies I like are the ones where the cunning hero is very careful and succeeds. This is not one of those. This story is about a pilot who is very lucky and crawls away from a crash that killed the rest of his crew. Found and nursed back to health by the resistance, he starts acting the fool. He's not afraid, he tells us, and if you think about it, it is understandable. He might be feeling a bit invincible right about now, after all he survived the crash and has a pretty woman looking after him. That kind of bravado is what gets you killed.

Bridge & Other Government Disasters

I remember the Silver Bridge disaster in Ohio when I was a kid. It was a narrow, steel truss over the Ohio River and one winter during rush hour it collapsed and dumped a hundred cars into the freezing water. Lots of people died. It was the first big bridge disaster I had ever heard of, and I thought, well, this will be a wake up call. The people responsible will take action and start inspecting bridges and this will never happen again. Silly boy.

Lately we seem to be having more than the usual number of embezzlements of local government funds around here. I remember hearing about one a year or so ago, and once again, I thought, well this will be a wake up call. All these little local government operations will be taking a close look at their finances and stopping all these embezzlers. Silly boy. We have had one every couple of months since and there doesn't seem to be any sign of it slowing down.

I started reading Al Gore's new book in Powell's bookstore the other day while I was waiting for my gang to finish whatever they were doing. He starts off talking about how fear clouds the mind and inhibits rational thought, and how when all those old famous dead guys were working on the constitution, this was one of their foremost considerations.

Then he starts talking about how the brain works, and what new brainiac researchers are discovering. People make decisions emotionally, and only after they have already made the decision does the rational, conscious brain get to deal with it, and since the deed is already done, the conscious brain gets to rationalize the decisions that the emotional brain has already made. In other words, your conscious mind is only along for the ride. You can try to influence your lower brain, but at some point, the emotional part of your brain makes the actual decision.

This goes along with something I read earlier that was talking about simple actions, like getting a glass of water. It takes milliseconds for a signal from your brain to tell your arm to do something. By the time you realize you want a glass of water, your hand is already holding the glass under the faucet. Your subconscious, emotional brain has already made the decision to get a glass of water, and it is just informing your conscious brain of that fait accompli.

So anyway, Fox News, Rupert Murdoch and Republican Party are engaged in fear mongering in order to sway your vote at the voting booth, and it worked for a while. Hopefully the damage wrought by their self-centered policies is becoming apparent and the Democrats will be able to take control, at least for a while.

At some level, I suspect there is no difference between the Republicans and the Democrats, but what can I do? Besides writing to try and influence other people (of course that can only work on people who bother to read), all I can do is vote, and I will be voting Democrat. Ever since the Republicans tried to bring down Clinton with their smear campaign, I have been repulsed by their vicious attitude towards anything that threatens their accumulation of even greater wealth. To heck with all of them.

Assassains & Car Chases

Car chases have been a staple of cops and robber movies for as long as I can remember. At some point I began to think that, okay, there was a high speed car chase once upon a time, and all of these police stories are using that one chase as a basis for having one in their movie. Then I moved to Phoenix where high speed pursuits are a weekly if not daily affair. I think the constant high temperatures fry peoples brains, or maybe they are just trying to cool off.

Lately assassins seem to be popular subjects for action movies. I have seen a bunch lately. I used to think about these assassination plots the same way I thought about car chases in movies. But at some point my view changed. I suspect there are a bunch of people out there making a living as free lance assassins. Perhaps it was a book I read, or maybe it was one of Morgan Freeman's lines in "The Contract", something about there not being any difference between opposing sides, and to Morgan, the assassin, it is just a job like any other job. Same sort of argument is given by Ned Beatty in "Shooter". Or maybe it is just the culmination of many things, not the least of which is the deaths of journalists in Russia.