caffeineslug.com

A Clean Slate

I think my site has been blank for something like a week now. As I've said before, missing a few items I want to post about just instigates this snowball of failure. "I keep meaning to write about such and such, but also these other things, and I don't have time to do it all now. I'll do it tomorrow," I say. Tomorrow comes, and I say the same thing, but the number of items has increased, so now it's going to take even more time. Thus, as time goes on, the less likely I am to have time to write about everything. Snowball of failure > me.

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When I left off, I just realized that pedals came in two different thread sizes, and I lost the coin toss. I remedied that by buying a new set, and they're infinitely better than what came on the bike. Bigger platform, and my feet stay in place much better.

I tried them out for the first time on a ride with Alan (a significantly better rider than myself) on a trail around South Mountain that would turn out to be well above my skill level. Between the fact that it was my first time seeing the trail, my general lack of mountain biking skill, and overall cautiousness, it was both mentally and physically draining. Mentally in that I was trying to process all of these obstacles on the trail that I didn't think I had the skill to overcome, so I was constantly doubting myself the entire time. No confidence. Physically in that there were just a lot of hills. :-P

While I think I could psyche myself up enough to hit that trail again, I'd want to at least see an improvement in skills elsewhere before trying it, I think. I spent a LOT of time walking the bike, and that's never as much fun. I scraped the new pedals up nicely as well. :-)

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We moved a couple weeks ago now, which was all sorts of fun. There's still a room full of junk, with no place for it to go. The garage needs work as well, which I almost look forward to. The bikes need to go up on the ceiling, and better use of shelving should help things out a bit.

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Now that we're in a house, of course, I could finally buy the subwoofer I've been wanting, the SVS PCi 20-39. :-D


I was a bit worried when I plugged things in, and didn't really get any sound from it at first. I eventually just had to turn the levels up on the amp and receiver a bit more than I thought to get anything, and now it's quite loud. I really need to get the whole thing calibrated though. Listening to music over media center, it didn't sound quite like I had hoped. My receiver being as old and partially feature-less as it is, I noticed that I have no idea what it's internal crossover is set to, so when it's on the "subwoofer" preout I'm not sure what frequencies it's getting. Hopefully with a dB meter and some calibration tools I can figure it out, I don't know.

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Finally, the issue of tires. After two autocrosses of hovering around the 900 point mark, I'll finally have a set of 710's on the car that should make me closer to competitive in my class. I really should have ordered them a couple months ago, but I'm cheap, obviously.

Posted by Ben at May 8, 2006 01:59 PM