Busy

All I have are excuses. I want to post, but school is currently destroying me. Only a couple more weeks until the end of the semester and a couple months worth of work to do. So I stay up late, don't see my family and live a fairly miserable existence for two more weeks until the semester is over. Hopefully it was worth it, I think this semester took a year off my doctoral program (not credit wise, but because all of my classes this semester are only offered once a year).

So here's what keeps me sane:
First off, my wife who takes care of EVERYTHING for me, except for my schoolwork. She's amazing!!
Second, my bike ride. Getting outside, breathing fresh air and relaxing everyday surrounded by the silence of nature has kept me sane.

Today, I want to write about my bike ride home last night. I was riding along the same road that I take every day. It parallels the railroad tracks and it's pretty dark, except some faint city lights coming through the train (and my incredible new headlight, but it doesn't point toward the sides). So I'm riding along and I see this little wave of shadows that seems to be following me, just off to the side. I put it off as the dancing shadows from the train that I often see. Then there was a truck approaching from the other direction with his headlights on and it changed the shadows a little so that I looked over and could see the silhouettes of about eight deer that were bounding along side me. At first I was thinking how cool it was that I was riding with the deer. Then I though about the oncoming truck and the fact that they could be started and turn right in front of me. That wouldn't be good, so I came to a stop, and luckily so did the truck. The eight deer passed between me and the truck and bounced off into a field.

That is why I ride my bike, because I get to ride with the deer rather than being afraid of what the deer will do to my car when I hit a it. I get to experience my commute instead of being a passive observer of an outside world.

The light...

Don't tell Mr. Potasky about these photos. I did take photography class in high school. I really liked the class and did quite well in it, but I will introduce you to some mistakes today. Someone has asked about my light and hub. This will be my last post about it because my next post needs to be about parenting, I have lots of questions.

So the hub is the top of the line Shimano dynamo. It's got a name made up of nothing but random numbers and letters so that nobody will ever remember it. It's a step above the Nexus (I think that is what the lower quality model is, but I also think of shampoo when I see that word). The SON hub is a step above the Shimano that I got, but I was unwilling to pay a lot of extra money for a little better performance. In reality, I can hardly tell that there's more resistance, but I like to blame my slowness on the drag of the new wheel, I know I was faster before the new hub... although it still takes about 45 minutes to get to school every day.

The light I got was a D-lumatec, or something like that. I had a few criteria that I needed 1) I wanted an LED, 2) It needed to be bright enough to see the road and 3) it needed to have a capacitor so that when I came to a stop sign my lights wouldn't go out. This light has all three things and I"m extremely pleased with it. I can finally see the road! I took some pictures to show how bright it is, they didn't turn out that great, but I"m posting them anyway.

Above is the inside of our back door illuminated by my old light.
Above is the inside of the back door with the new light. You will notice that the door handle is all blurry like it was a long exposure with a moving camera. It was. You see, in order to "turn on" the new light, you have to spin the wheel. In order to spin the wheel you have to pick up the front end of the bike. So it took two people to take this picture and still my "tripod" was not stationary (that was my wife's fault, I'm sure).Did you know that there was a feature somewhere so that you can turn pictures sideways... I should try it sometime. Anyway, you can see the old light on the handlebars and the new light is mounted behind the front brake caliper. Neither of the lights are on, but if you take a picture using flash into a reflective material it creates a bad picture, as you see above.
I really wanted to show what it looks like to be riding with the new vs. old lights on the road. This was my first attempt at taking a picture while riding (remember that to stop would mean that the light goes out except for the standby light which is not as bright). Well, somehow in taking the camera out of my pocket I pushed some buttons so that when I took the picture I saw in the viewfinder the camera was counting down from 10. So I aimed up the road, but by the time it got to 3, I noticed a car was coming... that was sort of awkward. Oh, and the flash was on. So this is what you see with flash photography with the new light and an oncoming car. It really isn't a good representation of what you really see.

So, I turned the counter thing off and the flash off so I could really get a good picture while riding with the new light. I should have waited for the passing car to get further ahead of me, but you can see the glow of the light in front of me, that's the new light with like a 30 second exposure, handheld on my handlebars while riding down the street. Riding with it, it seems a lot brighter than that. I'm not going to try any more to get a picture to compare the two lights, I am admitting defeat and leaving it alone.

Let there be light

Last night I finished truing the wheel and I got it all set up so I could use it on my ride in this morning. For the first time in the year and a half I've been commuting, I could see the road while i was riding at night. Now I can share some of the stories that I was afraid would upset my mother and grandmother because the problem has been cured.

For example, there's an area on my commute where I ride through a sort of swamp land next to the railroad tracks. It's on a road, but there is no development around so it's pretty dark. There also aren't any trees, except for a section about 400 meters long where there's a canopy of trees over the road. So on my commute I can sort of see on the open road (at least distinguish road from not road), and I usually ride right on the yellow line because that's the only part of the road that isn't black. The section that goes through the trees has no yellow line and the shadows from the trees make it so I can't tell road from not road. Luckily, there are a couple of street lights at the other end of the trees so I have something to aim for. So you go under the trees and it's like riding through a pitch black tunnel, you just shoot for the light at the end (and that was with my old headlight on). Today, for the first time in the dark, I was able to see the road I was riding on. I think this will be a good change

The other part of the ride where I have been a little nervous at night is at an intersection in the country with no lights around. Like I said before, I generally just follow the yellow line, because I can see it. At the intersection, the yellow line goes away, I have to turn left and hope to find the yellow line for the other road without riding into the ditch that I can't distinguish from road. Luckily I was batting a thousand and had never ended up in the ditch, but this morning I could actually see the road as I went through the corner. Oddly enough, i think i was able to take that corner faster today that I have previously. I'll write more about the new light when I have a bit more time, but as a preview, I love it!

On a completely different note, The Mugwump made a funny comment last night. He was sort of being a pill, and he wanted Mom to come in to the playroom while he got his things out of the dryer. She was busy, so I went in to help. He looked at me and said, "Dad, I love you, but I want someone pretty in the room, that's why I need Mom." They're so cute at that age.

The hub is in.

I got my hub yesterday. really I should be studying or writing a paper, but I'm excited to build a wheel. Anyway, someone commented that s/he wanted to know about the setup I would be running. I'll get some pictures when I get it set up, but until then I want to get some facts straight.
1) Sheldon Brown knows almost everything there is to know about bikes and has an incredibly informational site.
2) Peter White knows almost everything there is to know about bike lights and has the best site on the web for bike lights.

So while there are some rumors out there about generator hubs blowing up lights, I really don't think that is the case any more. technology has come a long ways and I think the new lighting systems are pretty good. I'll post more about what I got when I get it up and going.

I still feel like a complete traitor to the racing scene. I hold in my hands a really heavy hub that doesn't spin very well at all and I'm excited to put it on my bike. I feel like I should be making fun of the guy who bought it... Except that would be me.