MBM got out to a bit of a slow start this year.  Both Ryan and J had their bikes at the shop for a few weeks, plus the daily rain/hail storms have made riding difficult.

Although not as much mountain biking has occurred until this point, we have gotten together for 4 or 5 Music-Band-Monday’s instead, and a trail jogging session that crippled us all for about a week – that one was J’s idea.

But here we are, first big MBM excursion was to start exploring this super secret private singletrack nestled in the foothills by J’s new house.  All I can say is that J signed up for some trail work and got us a pass into this place…. and its fuggin’ awesome, hence “JJ’s Goldmine.”

Here are a couple highlights:

We rode through dusk and broke out the lights for the last leg of the downhill back to the car whooping and hollering the whole way.

Ryan had a dramatic flat finish rolling up to the car, pretty funny:

Saturday I got out for a good long solo ride on the Surly:

The trails were barely dry enough, I had to walk a few sections so not to damage the trail.  But still a fantastic ride, it felt great to get out.

Took the Surly because I’ve been lazy about tending to my mountain bike’s rear wheel.  The rear hub had developed some side to side play as well as a loose spoke (thanks Michaud..).

With another round of MBM coming up, needed to fix it.  My initial goal was to just fix the side play, bare minimum to get it back rolling.  I found this handy link as a reference for servicing a  Hadley 72-point rear hub:  LINKY

The service calls for a 21mm cone wrench and pin-spanners to remove one of the axle end caps.  I have pin-spanners, but no 21mm wrench.  Instead, I just used adjustable curved pliers with some rubber on the teeth to prevent marring.  The end caps aren’t supposed to be super tight, and since mine was loose already, the non-drive side spun right off practically by hand.

After removing the axle, the freehub body, pawls, spacers, needle bearing all pulled right out.  Used a rag to clean everything, bearings are good, re-greased it all with super-slick, reassembled, tightened the end caps and voila!  Done.  Took all but 15 minutes for a overhaul.

Really makes me appreciate the simplicity and design of the Hadley hubs, not needing special tools, or being overly complex to reassemble.  They are bomb proof hubs, and excellent value (sorry King).

After that, tightened up the loose spoke, minimal truing… ready to roll.

MBM is in Denver today, lets hope the rain holds out.

This weekend is our neighborhood’s annual communtiy garage sale.  Just scored myself a mint condition phil wood bottom bracket including the tool, and an ultegra rear derailleur for $2 each.  We have some cool neighbors!  K8 and Tamar of course bought a bunch of clothes…

Holy crap, I’m 10 days late with the news, but Steve Larsen died?!:

linky to velonews story

A while back I signed up for a twitter account to see what its all about.

So far, I think its pretty dumb.  Mostly a waste of time since the few times I’ve tried to log in and “surf” a bit, twitter’s server response seems so slow and choked up I end up just closing the window.

I use gmail for my personal email and really like how it keeps all email strings threaded in a single “conversation.” This feature really cuts down on the inbox clutter and is easily the biggest advance I’ve seen in any email client in a long time.  Well okay, a few other clients have this feature but Gmail is the only one that uses it well, by default, actually making it useful.

At work, I use Mozilla’s Thunderbird to talk to exchange (lack of calendaring yes, that’s another topic). The new division I’m working in generates TONS of email.  I average about 150/day. With the old standard non-threaded viewing of your inbox I find myself constantly scrolling around, re-grouping, re-sorting email to sift through email strings as not to miss any information – a total pain!

I finally spent some time to search for a solution… and found the Threadbubble add-on.  This simply enables threaded viewing in Thunderbird very similar to Gmail.  Awesome!

Upon further reading, I stumbled across the silly fact that this add-on is absolutely NOT necessary as Thunderbird already has threaded viewing capability, its just turned off by default.  The dumb thing is that its not exposed as an option – at least not easy to find.

The solution: Use Threadbubble.  Or, open up Thunderbird preferences(linux)/options(windoz), go to Advanced –> Config Editor.  Scroll down and look for “mailnews.thread_pane_column_unthreads” and change its default value to TRUE.  Restart Thunderbird, and bam!  However, the one thing you get out of Threadbubble add-on, is that it will “bubble” up threads to the top if sorted by Date.

I also read that threaded viewing will be the default behavior (or at least an option) whenever Thunderbird 3.x comes out.

The only quirky thing, is that sorting via the column headers can muck up the odering with threads… in my case I like having the newest thread always at the top… if I get the view mucked up, I use the View –> Sort by –> Date, then turn on threading again to get it how I like it.

Cheers, -e

I made it up to Horsetooth this weekend. First time doing the Towers and Mill Creek loop this year.  I had heard there was some damage at the park from the last heavy wet snow fall a week ago, but didn’t think it would be so devastating.

Frankly, most of the park is fine, tacky and fast right now for mountain biking.  Mill Creek though in particular is a mess.

There are so many fallen tree’s from heavy snow just on that part of the park that Mill Creek is absolutely impassable by bike, hardly by hiking.   It will take weeks for crews to clear it up.  There is not a single 200 foot section of that trail that is not blocked in some way!!  Bummer … almost any and every tree that was healthy took a beating.  I’ll be looking for volunteer days up there to help with the clean up.

On the brighter side – nothing like a freshly tuned-up mountain bike…

I’m an Ubuntu Linux fan.  I use the 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” release on most machines and at work.  To date, its definitely been the most stable and I can’t see moving off of Hardy until the next LTS release.

However, on my home system I tend to get upgrade fever.  Always looking for that new feature and update to Rhythmbox or Listen etc.  I originally upgraded from Hardy to 8.10 Intreprid… and regretted it.

Intrepid was way slow, don’t know why, but the desktop bring up was slower then Hardy, it took a good 20 seconds to connect to the network *after* the desktop was up.  Generally clunky interactivity.   For me it resurfaced the same NVIDIA issues I thought were fixed back w/ Gutsy!

With the release of Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jakewhatever, I was pretty skeptical and hesitant to move. Yet, Intrepid was sucking and I just backed-up my stuff, so I decided to try it thinking I’d just end up back on Hardy.

Long story short… Ubuntu 9.04 is awesome.  The new 15 second boot up is amazing.  The desktop is up and running, connected to the internet before I can get my hands on the keyboard.  Overall interactivity is the snappiest I’ve seen.

I even did the whole reinstall in less then 15 minutes.  Didn’t bother trying an upgrade, but rather did a fresh install using the CD.  I keep my “/home” on a separate drive, so by choosing manual partitioning, I just reloaded (formatted) “/boot” and “/” but kept “/home.”  Fifteen minutes later, I rebooted, had all my stuff, desktop and even wallpaper still in place.  Slick as hell.  (I stuck with ext3, not touching ext4 until is smells less foul).