Got up some pictures of our bikes.
Whenever I’ve taken the fixie out so far it has rained on me. Which has been ok since it’s warm and I can skid more easily.
As we were walking around the park with Sarah’s bike to take the pictures a bike nut stopped us and gushed about how awesome her bike is. I managed to hold my own in the conversation. Which is cool.
I also couldn’t agree more.
Bored at work.
They’ve been having trouble scraping enough time together to get me properly harnessed to something. I _was_ teaching myself flex/flash building fancy widgets for client sites. But that was on a trial version of the IDE which has now expired. Before x-fest my boss said they’d look into purchasing it. And now she’s been home sick since I got back. So I ocasinally wander into the middle of the office and plead for work. Occasionally someone finds a javascript bug for me to squash.
I feel like a tuned and trained greyhound being asked to catch frisbees. Without something to do I’m just getting more and more high strung. Enter bicycles.
The last couple days I’ve been killing the time by reading about bikes. My Craigslist Bicycles RSS feed is like that white stuff the Gem’Hadar have constantly being fed into their veins in star trek. It keeps me docile.
In fact on wednesday my lightning fast RSS-tuned craigslist reflexes won me my second bike. I love my expensive touring bike ‘mikey’. I’ve said to many people that riding to work is the most fun part of my day. But bike culture here runs deep and wide and from the first day I clapped eyes on a fixie I was smitten.
One of the great things about fixies is they’re done on the cheap. They’re a great way to repurpose old 10 speeds that would otherwise be trotting off to the landfill. So the challenge was set. Build a fixie for as cheap as possible that is as good as possible.
Thus I sidled up to the craigslist stream -The deepest waters of San Francisco’s bycicle estuaries- and waited.
The only things you really need are a fixed gear rear wheel and a bike to put it on. About a month ago I lashed out and picked up some wheels for 100$. If you’re willing to lace spokes onto fixed gear hubs yourself you could get a rear wheel going for half that. But I decided such persuits were just beyond my skill level.
I still haven’t seen a better deal float by so I think the purchase was sound. Now I just needed a bike to strap it to.
I had only one major requirement. It had to be a nice steel alloy or aluminum frame. Reynolds 531 or Tange no. 2 or a CroMoly frame was a must. These steel frames are much lighter than the high-ten steel that your bike is made of (unless this is Matt). The reason you don’t own one of these nice frames is that they cost considerably more to produce.
My price bracket for such a bicycle was around 75 dollars. That’s kind of rediculous. The cheapest 70’s Raleigh that fits my criteria is the Super Course. Which retailed for close to 1000$ in today-money. But time and tide do strange things to bicycles and they also wash them past my muddy bank on the mighty craigslist.
For months I’ve been waiting. I’ve prodded at undercosted schwins, trying to find that Fillet-Brazed frame the owner thought was welded. I’ve pounced on gorgeous Raleighs with ornate lugging (now Sarah’s bike). I have even tried to fell the peugeot beast which distinguished average from quality by the vagueries of a yearly changing paint job.
But until wednesday I had always comeback with jaws agape.
Enter my Dawes. 56cm hand built in england by Daws with ornate lugging made of Reynolds 531 steel. 60 dollars OBO
Flash goes the email! My size, my steel and mmm, ornate lugging I love you.
After the email was sent I scoured the copious pictures the seller had posted in an attempt to date the prey. Lugging, which means pre or early 80’s. Sugino cranks, can’t be original. Horizontal dropouts, early or pre 80’s again. Shimano shifters, can’t be original. A green to green fade paint job with no chrome… looks pretty 80’s to me. Handles with a map of england on them and a french motto? The hell? And who is Dawes anyway?? has anyone ever heard of this company? And lots and lots of nicks and scrapes.
Turns out Dawes is sort of Raleigh’s little brother. They never sold many bikes in North America but when they did they only sold their good bikes. No ever-present schwinn varsity be this beast.
So this beautiful frame with really great new sugino cranks and neato collectors item handle bars is going for 60 dollars. Washed to within my grasp by the magic combination of the unknown brand, rusty nicks and scratches everywhere, and being unridable due to a horribly bent rear wheel.
Email comes back. Someone else knows what it is. Even though I was the first to respond someone else offered 75$. But the seller gives me a chance to match it. Which I do. This _should_ go for 150 in San Francisco. If it had a Raleigh head badge, twice that. Luckily my fellow hunter declines the jump to tripple digits and I get my bike! Giddy!
Oh joy as I cart it upstairs later that evening. In all of its crap shifter, scratched to hell, rear wheel won’t spin glory! It practically floats up the stairs; boyed by light steel and giddy delight!
I get it upside-down over some cardboard in teh kitchen post-haste. I don’t need a rear brake, off it comes (weiman vaquers, nice). Down-tube shifters in all their anachronystic splendor get stripped away (might end up replacing Sarah’s cheap suntory downtube shifters). Front derailer gets plucked from the frame (two gear shifter sitting over 3 sugino gears, wierd). Rear derailer is remo… lifte… ripped… gar! I don’t have the right size allen key!? Damn it and I can’t fit the back wheel because I only have one crescent wrench? gah!
The rest of the night is spent on bent knees with a cleaning solution and much scrubbing. In the end the bike looks… slightly cleaner… I guess.
Next day I spend my whole lunch hour trecking by lowly foot (raining, no bike) to the closest bike shop and hardware store to purchase necessary tools.
Back with the bike. The rear derailer knows defeat! I strip off the biggest front sprocket, then the second and clean them in the sink. Back on the bike goes the second, and in the closet goes the first. The rear wheel, after much convincing, is stripped of axle spacers (used to line up the rear cog with the front cog). Chain tool splits the old chain into a string and I droop it over the two gears. Sized up, I strip off the 5 or 10 excess links and join it up again.
The rest of the night is spent messing with spacers and trying to get the front and back sprockets lined up to the millimeter.
Unfortunately my wheels don’t have the tires on them and I don’t own a pump. The bike store next door locks one outside during working hours so we’ve just been using that. But it’s 10:30pm and they are very closed.
So the bike is ready to roll and I cannot ride it! Neither will I be able to ride it tonight (friday) as a hundred year storm has stopped me from treking again on foot and buying a pump. At least Sarah gets home tonight! That should aleviate my fixation.
There are still issues with it. The chainline isn’t *quite* right and I’m going to have to re-dish the wheel like crazy. But glory glory is she light. Lighter than my aluminum roadster since all the stuff has been stripped off.
This weekend we will confront the world together. I will see if I can get used to riding fixie and it will see if it can stay in one piece.
Parts: 175$
Tools: 50$
Total Gross Cost of Everything: 235$
Not bad for a light-as-air hipster bike.
First post in forever. Just want to catalogue this great day.
We have generated a sort of normal sunday routine. Today we seem to have gotten a nearly perfect day out of it.
Woke up early and got out of the house around 9:30 and rode our bikes into the park. I’m riding this obscenely great road bike that was my present to myself when I got a job. Really someone who’s touring or racing should be riding it but too bad. I got to it first. Sarah’s ride is way cooler than mine and not much less functional. Last week I got up bleary eyed and took a street car down into sunset and bought her a 1974 raleigh Grand Prix 10-speed. It spent the last ten or 15 years in a garage and is in really good condition. It’s green with ornate bronze-trimmed lugging and is completely gorgeous.
So with the sun beating down we rode down the main road (closed to cars on sundays) and then down the bike path past ponds and tropical trees. We rode down to a coffee house on Judah across from the beach. I had the best croisant I’ve had since thailand and we both had Gypsy tea. Tea so good we ordered several tins of it from new york a few weeks ago.
The ride back was as nice as the ride down. Sarah was originally trepedacious about bikes in general and nearly affraid of roadbikes and their foreward-leaning posture. But she’s really good on her bike and is even getting the hang of the index-less shifter leavers mounted on the down-tube by her knees.
So from there we surfed the web a while. I’m reading a book about squatters around the world I’m really enjoying. It has a very different view of Brazilian Favelas than I have seen before.
Then to lunch. Well really we were still pretty full from breakfast so lets just have a pint at the local brew pub, Magnolia. Their brown ale out of a gravity tap is mmm. Then we wandered into Richmond to pick up some computing widgets for Sarah’s reinstall of windows.
Back home to do some more reading and Sarah’s started playing ‘drawn to life’ which she says is ‘awesome for creative’. I’m also really enjoying trolling the local craigslist bicycle listings and reading up on vintage raleighs.
Then dinner. I have been complaining since we got here that we haven’t had a really good meal. All the restaurants here are uninspired. There’s a Thai place up the street that’s good but the bar for Thai food is pretty damned high. So anyway I’ve been collecting suggestions. One of the suggestions was Hama-Ko which is a shushi ya just a couple of blocks from us.
So we wander up there and have a little trouble finding the place. It has no sign and it’s just big enough for four or five tables. Serious deja-vu from Japan walking into the place. All through the meal I had to keep reminding myself I didn’t have to order in gestures and horribly broken japanese.
The meal was, absolutely, fantastic. We loaded up on nigiri and a couple of roles. It’s been run by this japanese couple for 25 years with no sign and no advertising. It’s crazy delicious. We ordered all of our favorites and she recomended the Thai Snapper and the Scallops. The scallops were among the best things I have ever eaten. The unagi (baked eel) roll was among the best unagi I’ve ever had which is among my favorite foods. The Toro and Meguro (both cuts of tuna) were up there for best I’ve had in north america, although fresh tuna in the Ueno fish market soundly trumps it as best fish ever tasted.
So we finally had a really good meal. It took us two or three months to find a good restaurant, and it is pricey, but at least it’s close.
We finished the ‘gastronomic perfect storm’, as I am refering to today as, with a pecan bar at a favorite coffee place. Sarah had a roibose-chai tea and I had a double espresso.
Now we’ll round out the night with a bath and a good book/good ds game/cruising craigslist for a 1970’s Raleigh super sport with a brampton flip/flop hub.
See you all in a week!
Yay we have a living room.
Sorry it took me forever to write this.
We also have a kitchen table. We were trying to avoid ikea because we’ve both pretty much only ever had ikea furniture. But now we’re young professionals! Time for a change!
So pretty much everything you see in that shot is from ikea.
Except the cofee table. I made that.
The big challenge has been finding a couch we like. We wanted something low to the ground and modern in design. So simple, clean lines. We also wanted something that didn’t cost 4000$.
We ended up wandering around the (fairly vast) furniture district of San Francisco looking for our dream couch. We found two suitable sofa’s but they were both priced rediculously. We also started reading a couple furniture design blogs because they’re neat. So that further refined our desires. (http://padstyle.com/ is really cool)
So we gave up and decided to try ikea. We also hadn’t found a simple kitchen table and we knew we could find that at ikea.
We had seen one of their couches on their website and thought it looked cool. But when we got there it was really cheap and flexy. Then we found this couch. And the key was realising we could just not put the legs on and we’d have our low-slung tokyo-style couch.
So we got our couch! Yay! And that rug. Ikea’s rug selection is bigger than anyone else’s and they cost from 1/2 to a tenth as much.
And our simple kitchen table with chairs. And a corner desk. Which was cheap but is pretty awful.
So yay. The room still feels unfinished. Like that big blank wall that needs Kyoto woodblock prints.
Alright time for a post.
but rather than talking about san francisco or our appartment or the interminable search for work or something interesting I’m going to talk about heros. *shrugs* it’s what I feel like talking about.
Movies. Seen two since we got here: stardust and transofrmers.
Stardust tried but we both thought it fell short. Sometimes way short. A lack of interesting characters and awfull awfull abuse of music. Plus we recently saw Pan’s Labarynth which had the same feel but was fucking awesome.
And why didn’t I see transforners when it came out? I didn’t know until we got here. The IMAX version is playing in town! w00t w00t! Except that the movie sucked. Sucked hard. That was really really bad. Stock characters picked right off the shelf. A rediculous plot. Full of holes. Uninspired fight scenes.
I read the leaked script way before it came out so I knew what I was in for. Although man was the script I read a high-water mark. Just real quick here’s the hole I hated the most:
The movie is laboured with obnoxious hacker people. All the hacker people actually DO is call in the air force to the final battle (with a comodore 64 and a ww2 radio). So the jets show up and they’re going to use marine sighted lasers to drop a bomb on a disepticon. But the disepticon freaks out and the marines fuck up their sighting and a main charater does something rediculous on a motorbike to kill the disepticon instead. Then starscream kills all the jets. That’s it. Jets gone. Net gain: zero. So the hackers are given 30 minutes of cumulitive screen time and all they do is call in some jets that might as well have not been called in! How do those characters survive editing?
So the movie was too suck to be good on its own merits and too different from the cartoon to be nostalgic.
In less suck news: Battlestar Gallactica. Missed almost the whole 3rd season in Thailand so we (Sarah’s started watching it!) got to catch the whole thing up, with directors commentary, in just a week or so. These guys know what they’re doing. Strong plots, great characters, looks amazing. overall great. We aren’t watching the last two eps because it’s going to be an end of season cliff hanger. Forget that, we’ll watch them when the new season starts in jan.
We are finally watching heros. Which everyone and their dog recomends. We’ve got the whole first season and are watching it straight through. Which should be the optimal way to watch a contiguous serial like this. It’s ok but not nearly as good as I thought it was going to be. They expected alot of investment in the characters right away. Here are a two people you know nothing about, their mairrage is in trouble! Frett! Which isn’t really a problem past the first few episodes. Except that alot of them never really get interesting ever. I blame the writing. A few people, like the cop, Hiro, Ando, and to a lesser extent the cheerleader and her dad are interesting. But I think that’s because they have strong actors who save otherwise bland characterisation.
Being able to paint the future only when you’re injecting heroin _should_ be cool. But somehow they just don’t make me care. And alot of the other story lines are the same way. Mabey they just have so many story lines they can’t flesh any out to the point where they’re interesting.
We’re halfway through the season so they’ve abandoned Syler the mystery villain and Evil Government Agency the mystery villain. Which were so 5th season buffy lame. Now that both are proper characters mabey we can get a little nuaunce in there.
We have said goodbye to the indian guy. We gave him 12 episodes to start acting better and for writers to stop making him spout awfull awfull awfull awfull evolutionary psudo-science. But eventually we couldn’t put up with him any more. We fast-foreward through his plot arc. God help us when he gets back with the group. Even now we have to put up with his InsufferablE narration.
Plus I don’t know how you people watched it from week to week. They’re an hour long but nothing happens! It took them half the season to do nothing but save a cheerleader! I get antsy waiting through a whole episode let alone a week.
So yeah, there are some OK plot threads but really not enough to keep us watching. So why are we going to finish the season?
Hiro Protagonist… er.. I mean Hiro Nakamura. Oh man. Diamond in the rough. This rules. From the first line of the first shot of his subplot it was like a different show. Awesomness abounds. I care about the two characters they seem to be going somewhere, there’s humor and pathos. Wicked. Also I guess powers have to get pretty overwhelming to be interesing now. Alot of writers have asked “wow what would it be like if you could FLY!?”. Not as many have asked what would happen if you could pause and rewind time. And I think Hiro is approaching this question in a realistic, intersting, and human way.
When someone re-edits the show to remove all the non-Hiro plots; that will be a good show.
Although… I think at some point I heard someone say he dies? Ah well if it does it better be a fakeout or watch those ratings slide baby.
So I want to see more movies but no tv = no previews = I have no idea whats going on. I need recomendations people!
aha, our couch just arrived. Gotta jet!
