Automotive Brake Parts Cleaner for Bikes

My new favourite bike cleaning tip: Automotive Brake Parts Cleaner.
Available from autozone or anywhere else. I had some laying around so I tried it out on my Shimano Ultegra shifters (because you can't / I don't want to - take them apart) and have since adopted it for lots of other uses. It blasts away all the crud, dries quickly on its own, and doesn't leave residue so you can follow it with oil/grease as appropriate. Today I cleaned the chain on my fixie with the stuff. Amazing. Like new.
One word of caution, it ate the spraypaint on my front fork (Used it to clean my front brake caliper) so if you're worried about the finish you need to be really careful. I'm not sure whether it has any other negative consequences like eating the lining on brake cables or breaking down plastic parts, but I haven't seen any problems with it.

A tip I have mixed feelings about, though, is a "dry" lubricant. I used some liquid plumber dry lubricant on my road bike last week and within 2-3 rides it was making a lot of noise. I put good old trusty Phil Wood Tenacious oil on the chain and dérailleurs and everything seems back in order. I gave the stuff a second chance and used it on my fixie's chain today, though, so we'll see how that works out.

Tomorrow I'm going to finish taking photos for my aero bar modifications post, I promise.

Also, today I ordered the first plate for my letterpress experiment. The press is mostly built, but I'm going to wait on the plate before finalizing it and publishing my report on the whole process.

Race Recap - Stanford Treeathlon

I'm getting a little out of order already because I want to post about my latest aerobar modifications, which I did last week before my race, but results are in from the Stanford Treeathlon on Sunday.

It was my first triathlon (since doing the Iron Kids races about 10 years ago) and overall a great experience. I had fun, was pleased with my performance, and am definitely glad I did it.

However, it was not without it's problems. For one thing, I got a flat tire on my first lap of the bike course. Spent 10 minutes on the side of the road changing it. Boo. I also had a bit of a mechanical problem turn up with my rear hub right before the start of the race, which resulted in brake rubbing for much of the ride. Easy to fix once I got home, but trying to get it figured out in the minutes right before the race started was not going to happen. And of course the swim was cold and choppy, but I expected that. Run was pretty thoroughly uneventful.

More importantly, I think I was cited for drafting.
In the grand scheme of things, as a middle-of-the-pack age grouper who already incurred a huge deficit for my flat tire, it's not a big deal, but it still frustrates me terribly.
On the course I was putting a lot of effort into making sure I was NOT drafting, even to the point of not paying as much attention as I should have to my own speed and power numbers for pacing. Part of the issue was certainly that we only had a single, narrow lane and it was a very crowded course. Hopefully this is the exception in a race rather than the rule. I found myself frequently, though, held up by riders who were going ever-so-slightly slower than I wanted to. Keeping 3 bike lengths slowed me down too much, but I often had to push way above my intended power window to actually pull off the pass. How are either of these options doing justice to triathlon as an "individual effort" like all the "drafter suck" jersey wearing zealots claim? There was a strong enough headwind on parts of the course that even at 3 bike lengths or more, you were benefiting from the rider in front of you. But much more frequently there was enough traffic that the riders ahead were a detriment. As far as I'm concerned, as long as you're not totally camping out in the wake of a faster rider or intentionally trading pulls, who cares? I know there's a huge push in the sport to combat drafting, but I will go ahead and say that I don't like it.

Anyways, the benefit of this is that I am more driven to develop enough power to overtake other riders without blowing up. One of the frustrating things on the course was seeing BIG guys blow past me. I know I was much much more aero than then, but they obviously had the raw power to push harder.

My GPS track is here:
http://trail.motionbased.com/trail/activity/5095945

Phew. Garmin Edge is back alive.

Huge sigh of relief this morning when I got my Garmin Edge bike computer working again. About a week ago it stopped syncing to my computer. I've still been using it, but without a GPS track on my computer my workouts seem to not really count. Yea, I'm that much of a data geek.

Yesterday I bought a new USB-Mini-USB cable from Radio Shack. No dice.
I was particularly worried about it because I used it yesterday on my first open water swim practice and really wanted to see the tracks.
So I put some rubbing alcohol in a syringe, got out a magnifying glass, and carefully cleaned the contacts on the back of the device. Just squirt a little alcohol onto each one and carefully rub it a few times with the pointy end of the syringe. Squirt in a bit more alcohol once you're done and wipe it out with a scrap of cloth to clean the receptacle itself.

Plugged it back in and it worked. Now off to ride. Yay!

Also did an open water swim yesterday. Went okay. Had a problem with my hands freezing. Might try some new stuff today or tomorrow and will report on it then.

A Gentle Introduction

I've been thinking about making a new blog for way too long now. I wanted to document some of my past projects and interests and never got around to it. Don't want to let that happen again, so here we go.

I should note, too, that I used to "blog" back in the day. I don't think I ever called it a blog. That one was largely personal. This one will hopefully be more informative and actually useful to people.

So what can you expect to see here?

• Cycling and Triathlon, especially technical issues. Last summer/fall I built a fixed gear and wished I would have documented it online. At the moment I'm getting into triathlon, training with a power meter, tweaking my aerodynamics, open water swimming, and some other cycling/triathlon related issues.
• Computer stuff related to blogs themselves. I'm currently working on my masters thesis in the area of natural language processing using blogs. Specifically, I'm working on authorship attribution. Not sure how much of that will make it here, but hopefully I'll be able to write a bit about what I'm doing.
• Cooking. Since I started grad school and living on my own, I've discovered that I really love cooking. Again, not sure how much I'll actually write about here, but might try to document some of the dishes I make, perhaps even just for my own record keeping. I really love using fresh vegetables and other nice ingredients, often trying to utilize local California flavors.
• Photography, Art, Etc. Currently I'm working on building a home depot letterpress to do my wedding invitations. Probably going to the store this afternoon to get parts. I'm also trying hard to finish the USNA Yearbook, so I'll post some thoughts on that as well. I used to be more into photography and graphic design, so I might still post things related to that from time to time.
• Probably more. I tend to pick up new interests every few weeks, so it should be interesting to see what sort of schizophrenic blog I wind up with.

So yea, that's about it for now. I'm currently listening to Ultimate Fakebook for the first time in a long time and wanted to comment that "Open Up and Say Awesome" is about the best title for a record ever. Second only maybe to NOFX's "Punk in Drublic"

Hopefully I'm not too far off base in assuming that other people will have some interest in what I have to say. I'll probably try to optimize my tagging and such for search engines so people can actually find the information they want in the vast wasteland of the intraweb.