i borrowed paul’s slicks last night and installed them this morning. my max top speed on flat ground was around 15mph before i switched from my mountaing biking tires to the slicks. with these new tires on, i can go a little faster than 20mph. that’s a 5mph increase from just switching tires! if i got a road bike, that’d probably be at least another 5 mph.

i’m going to see how the commute to work will be with the new tires. it looks like there will be no mountain biking on my bike for a while, though. it didn’t take TOO long to switch out the tires, but it certainly isn’t something that i would want to do with regularity.

i biked to work again. i know, i know, bike to work day is over, but after i had some time to forget how hot it was outside, i thought that it wasn’t so bad. this morning, the bike ride was about 3.3 miles with no distractions or side routes. it took me about 20 minutes to bike it and i was very actively trying to go at a much slower pace. i’m trying to figure out how slow i have to bike so that i won’t be sweaty when i get into work. the problem is that it is so hot outside in the mornings that i think i get sweaty just standing outside. i wonder how much less effort this would be if i got a road bike instead of using my mountain bike.

i just talked to paul and he’s going to lend me his slicks. we’ll see how much of a difference that makes. i even considered getting a road bike, but i think i’ll hold off on that until i’m serious about this whole biking thing.

the only dilemma with biking to work is that lunch choices are limited to what i can bike to. that takes a bunch of places out of contention because the distance to some of my usual lunch spots are longer than my commute and i don’t want to be all sweaty to eat lunch. i wonder if it is worth it to start bringing lunch to work…that is added weight that i’d have to carry though… hmmmmm…

i don’t know if it is because i biked to work this morning or if it is because i didn’t get much sleep last night, but i have been exhausted today. for a part of the day it was a struggle to even stay awake.

i biked to lunch because…well, i was already committed and didn’t have any other choice. i forgot to bring my bike lock, though, so i had to go get something to go. it only seemed appropriate, then, that i would go to togo’s to go.

the round trip was 2 miles. the weather was pretty hot, i’d guess in the high 80s.

the bike ride home was miserable. i think the temperature was in the high 90s, but felt like it was closer to human vaporization temperatures. awful, awful, awful. after i got home, i jumped into the shower and that was a little relief, but still, the house was hot, too. it certainly hurts to be green.

i have NEVER wanted to compete in a bicycle race before. the thought of it just seems ridiculous. bike distances? for what purpose? but when i came across the utah tour de donut, it made me really think twice about it. yes, it is a 21 mile bike race. but here’s how it works:

1) bike 7 miles. stop. eat as many donuts as you want.
2) bike 7 miles. stop. eat as many donuts as you want.
3) bike 7 miles. finish.

that’s not all, for every donut that you eat, you get to subtract 3 minutes from your total time. this is all surface street biking, too, so it should be relatively flat. but a race where you are forced to stop, take a break, and eat donuts? man, if ever someone wanted to motivate me to enter a race, that’s the way to do it.

it is completely unlike me to move unnecessarily. i firmly believe that that’s why remote controls were made. i still remember the day when we had to walk up to the tv and turn a knob to change a channel. ridiculous, i know! and then it was all the rage to have a wired remote control. man, those were the days.

but with digital media, the thought of having to pop a tape in to watch a recorded tv show is gone and to be liberated from the confines of physical media and its limitations are just great. it’s too bad that there isn’t an easier and faster way to rip blu-ray discs so i won’t have to deal with those anymore, but that’s a story for another day.

today is bike to work day. at least, it is in the bay area. there seems to be some discrepancy about when bike to work day really is. apparently the league of american bicyclists officially holds bike to work day on the third friday of may.

so anyway, today’s bike to work day and i heard it on the radio yesterday, so i decided to go and try it out. according to the bike computer, my commute from home to work was: 22 minutes, 4.44 miles averaging 11.9 miles per hour. it was actually a longer than expected commute because when i first left the house, i turned around after a block to go and fill up the tires with more air. then, while biking to work, a very distressed woman who was looking for an address asked me for directions. though i didn’t know where she was headed towards, i tried to help her, pointed her in a direction, and then went ahead. i found the address she was looking for, double-backed, and gave her some better directions and tried to comfort her. she, apparently, was headed towards a much needed job interview and got lost walking around.

google maps says that my route without interruptions should be 3.6 miles and it should take me 11 minutes to drive there. the problem with biking on surface streets for me is that i don’t know how to bike at a leisurely pace. i always end up pushing myself harder than i should and as a result i get all sweaty. but anyway, it was a good bike ride to work, i might consider biking to work more often. it, of course, figures, though, that bike to work day is on the hottest day of the year so far, with temperatures forecasted to be at a high of 99F today. ugh, i am not looking forward to the bike ride home.

i bought the 4GB ipod nano back in 2005 after my disk-based ipod had broken. it was time for a new ipod and this new sexy device seemed like it was just the right thing. it was a joy to use. there was a color screen. at one point, i even installed linux on it. i know, linux on an ipod? why bother? i did it for the geek factor, but wiped it clean after that because there just wasn’t much i wanted to do in linux on the nano. but here we are now, a couple of years later, a few ipod generations down the road, and 4GB just doesn’t seem like it’s enough space. it didn’t seem like it was enough space back then, but now it just feels horribly confining. the crazy thing is that i don’t think that i really have that many mp3s. sure, i converted my entire CD collection to mp3, but still, it isn’t like i have a growing mp3 collection. it’s all nostalgia. there will be times when i get into the 80s erasure mode and i have every single erasure song i have ever owned on the thing. and sure, there was that jewel phase i went through. i think i downloaded every single bootleg that i could find when she first came out. there’s a lot of yodeling there.

but anyway, here we are, and 4GB just seems like it just isn’t enough. the big question is, is it time to get a new mp3 player? my nano is still working great. it’s not like there’s anything wrong with it. i guess i’m just going to have to wait until the poor guy gives up. with no moving parts, though, there’s no drive to crash. it’s just a matter of when the electronics are going to fail…or when i accidentally drop it in the toilet or something.

that’s ok, i really want the itouch, but i don’t want to spend the ridiculous amounts of money that it costs now. maybe i’ll wait for the 3G iphone and finally make the switch. i don’t know if i can commit to the data plan that AT&T requires, seems like a pretty hefty investment. oh well, i guess there’s no mp3 player in the near future for me. i guess i should just suck it up and delete the buffy musical that i’ve been carrying around all these months…

*sigh* the throwaway digital camera that i ordered arrived today in the mail and the camera itself is everything that i expected it to be. there are several things, however, that i did not expect, that if i had done better research, i should have known.

first off, the camera comes with an external battery charger. ugh. this is the one that i’m really kicking myself about because i bought another external charger thinking that the camera doesn’t come with one. the f30fd model did not come with an external charger, so i just assumed that all fujifilm cameras had to charge the batteries in-camera. this was wrong and i could have saved myself the $10 that i spent to get a charger. oh well, i can double charge batteries, i guess.

secondly, the camera does accept xD and SD memory. i’ve already made a bit of an investment in the crazy proprietary xD memory format with the old fujifilm camera that i have, so i thought it would be great that this camera supports both formats. i have a 4GB SD card that is sitting around doing nothing right now, so i thought it would be super cool to be able to use that and the 2 xD cards i have. it turns out that though the camera accepts both formats, it only accepts them one at a time! i sort of assumed that like the canon 1D bodies, it would accept both formats at the same time. it just means that i can’t carry 6GB of memory around in-camera like i had hoped.

RTFM, man! that’s what i keep telling myself. oh well.

i got a free mini tripod with the camera. i had forgotten that i got it when i bought the camera. we’ll see if i ever use it. i also ordered a larger, hopefully more useful, compact tripod with the batteries which have been shipped over the weekend and should come any week now!

oh well, it’s $10 that could have been spent elsewhere, but i guess it’s better that it’s just $10 instead of more.

if only the battery would hurry up and charge so that i could try and take some pictures now…

you know, technology in IM clients hasn’t really changed much in the last few years. it’s a pretty straightforward technology. i don’t really use IM clients for much more than messaging, but sometimes i have used it to share photos. sure, that’s a nice touch, but with all of the IM accounts that i have, it’s nice to have one client that handles it all.

for the longest time that one client was triliian. i have been a diehard trillian user for the longest time. i tried using pidgin, but felt that the UI was just too ugly. miranda felt awkward to me and after i started using mac os x on my personal laptop, adium just looked so beautiful.

on the pc side, i have started to use digby. it supports the same theme that i use in adium (modern bubbling) so i get a very similar experience on my personal laptop and the work laptop. i know, i know, functionally, it’s all the same, but still, it’s the little touches that seem to make the experience better. mix things up, try something new, and give it a whirl if you aren’t using it.

i just ordered a couple of camera accessories for the new point and shoot. just batteries and a charger. i hear that the battery life on this camera is much worse than that of the previous version, so i bought some extra batteries. i’m a little nervous, though, because i ordered the batteries from some store i’ve never heard of in hong kong.

the thing is that batteries have got to be one of the most overpriced accessories that one can buy for a digital camera. the manufacturer wants something like $40 for a replacement battery! i ordered two for $9. even with $6 shipping, that’s still way cheaper than what the manufacturer wants. i just hope that this store isn’t a scam!

i also bought a separate charger for the batteries so that i can charge batteries while using the camera. i have this huge phobia about batteries. back when i first started using a digital camera, a set of batteries would last me about 20 shots. so i carried a TON of batteries with me wherever i went. that habit hasn’t stopped, so i totally overbuy batteries now. i can’t help it. there’s nothing worse than bringing a camera and then running out of batteries to miss that one shot that you’ve been waiting for all day long!

so i actually bought a combo pack of 2 batteries and a charger and then 2 more batteries on top of that. i know, overkill. what is my problem? what i actually like to do is carry two batteries in my big camera bag and then have another set of batteries for normal use. it’s security in power (cells).

there was this coupon for $6 off a $34 order, so i had to buy a little something to take me over that magical price. i ended up buying a $9 mini flexible tripod. i hope it comes in handy. all told, the order was still less than the cost of a manufacturer’s battery, so i guess i made out pretty well. i wonder how long shipping from hong kong will take via regular post…

there’s another tomtom deal for the tomtom xl-s at dell right now and it’s at the lowest price point i’ve seen it. i told myself that once i saw it at that price again, i would get it, but recently, my tomtom has been working really well. it hasn’t had problems finding satellites and i think that it is back to working just dandy. i guess i’ll wait and see if tomtom is going to give me any more problems again before i think about upgrading, but it would, of course, make sense that there’d be a deal for what i want when i don’t need it.

oh well. i just ordered my replacement throwaway camera. the LCD cracked on my fujifilm f31fd. it sounds like it’s going to cost more than it is worth to fix, though the replacement camera, i hear, doesn’t have image quality that is as good as this camera. oh well. the other bummer is that the underwater housing doesn’t work with the new camera, so i better get to selling that thing pretty quick.