Sunday, February 15, 2009

The Next Bike




I had a meeting with John Caletti the owner and builder behind Caletti Cycles in my garage. I gave John a deposit to start the process of building my next bike: a custom 29“ rigid belt drive single speed. The result will be very similar to his impressive Buckethead single speed that he built for himself last summer. This bike will be steel, rigid (no suspension) and only one gear but this is no retro bike. We will be using state of the art components like the belt drive, disc brakes and Chris King components. Why would I willing to pay good money for essentially a high end kids bike? I’m a technical rider and mountain biking technology has made it too easy to ride challenging terrain on my local trails. The only dimensions left to challenge me are bigger drops and more speed, speed, speed. 

I love tearing around the trails on my full springers but I have to ride a lot faster in order to find the technical challenges I desire. I get similar challenges by getting on my single speed and riding these same trails but I tend to ride with more nuance at lower speeds. Recently, a bunch of my riding buddies have been getting 29ers and I really like the riding characteristics of the bigger wheels. Putting the big wheels on a single speed seems like a great idea.

John and I spent a few hours talking about the bike fit. We looked at several of my bikes and determined what properties I like or do not like. He put many of the bikes on a wind trainer while I rode and he measured various dimensions and angles. Bike fit is probably the best reason to get a custom bike. Many of the bike fames we buy are decent compromises between fit, cost and performance and we make up for short comings by adjusting the components. In a custom process the frame is designed around the rider and the property sized components are added to the bike as part of the design. John used to work at the Spokesman - which is the place to get a professional bike fit in Santa Cruz county so he understands the relationship between rider and bike dimensions.

It was really awesome process. John is very detail oriented and understands the relationships between bike dimensions and ride characteristics. I want a bike that can handle quickly, a great climber and can descend with confidence. This bike will be used mostly on the local single track so I want a bike that can carve turns and roll over roots and rock gardens with ease. Later that afternoon, John created a design based on the data he gathered.

The process is going to take a few months and I’m already feeling anxious about riding it.

Thursday, February 12, 2009

Evaluating MacJournal

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I haven’t been updating this blog because... well... I have been busy. Other than that I find the blogger editor/manager to be frustrating. It seems that all of Google’s software has seen a lot of improvements over the past few years yet Blogger is hopelessly out of date. Why don’t they make it like Google Docs? I’m hoping that MacJournal will help me blog more often.

My initial thoughts are that this is a nice piece of software. I have it set up like a 3 pane email application with the folders on the left side, entries at the top and the main editor pane taking up most of the screen in the bottom right.

The good
  • Very Mac like. It has been designed as a modern Mac application so it’s easy to pick up
  • A visual rich text editor make it simple to do formatting.
  • Easy integration with existing blogs like blogger and wordpress. Set up is easy and you can download all the blog entries.
The not so good
  • No way of previewing the journal entry at Blogger. You can select “View Blog in Browser” but it takes you to the index - not the selected entry.
  • Can’t figure out how to wrap images.
These are my initial impressions after using this software for about 20-30 minutes. I’m going to try it for the 15 day evaluation period and see if i use it enough to warrant the reasonable $35 price tag.