20 GOTO 10

Since I’ve gotten rid of my car as of last month and no longer spend over $1000 per month on being a car person, I’ve developed and over $1000 per month bicycle habit that I will attempt to quickly curb. I’m beginning to accept the fact that I’m just another idiot with a little bit more money than the next, harder working guy.  Something I’ve been able to rationalize with the mentality of “I’m reasonably intelligent, therefore I’m not wasting, I’m researching.”  This may simply be bullshit.  Bicycles are not something I feel that I’m particularly talented at anyways, which is great reason to tinker around with track bikes.  They are simple, and therefore stupid people can understand them.  And because I sit in front of a computer for 10 hours a day, the fact that they are very impractical for living on nob hill, and stupid choice for utility, or comfort, works to my health’s advantage.

Anyways, today I decided to change my bicycle chains because one was stupid and ugly and came with the bike, and the other was getting close to worn. I decided to buy the SRAM PC-1 bmx chain, because I don’t feel right buying 60$ Wippermann 1G8 or Izumi V chains just to have and NJS stamp and the srs.biz look. I mean, I guess it’s ok to buy them just for looks, since I guess its a good product, but those KMC colored chains are just fruity, and the white chain the damn bike came with was just beyond retarded.

The bike also came with soma hellyer “track” pedals, and these things are pieces of shit. They got all bent up quite easily, and they just dont feel sturdy at all. They are also $60. At first I thought, well maybe they are a light-weight pedal for the track, not for retards like myself riding fixed gear bikes in the city. So I went to the website, and it said “shaped for more cornering clearance,” which clearly means city biking, and which also implies “for retards doing retard track bike bullshit.” In short, these pedals are not worth the money, the weight reduction sacraficed too much structural integrity. I promptly went and got another pair of MKS Sylvans, only $20, absolutely reliable, and not light weight at all. If you dont go clipless, these pedals are the best city track pedal, especially if you use a track bike for things they werent originally intended for.

The last product I bought was new straps, since what the bike came with were these Christophe leather straps. I want to call them the worst straps in the world, but I’m certain there are plenty of shitty straps. They basically feel like rubber bands. I cant imagine trusting them for any long term serious use if you do any kind of back-pedaling or stand-up pedaling at all. I’ve used vintge alfred binda leather straps with a laminated layer between the leather since you can get lucky and find them used for like $5 from time to time. I decided to just go ahead and buy the MKS Alpha Sport straps for $70 because they were leather straps with nylon lamination. I was hoping they were the case of a good product for an expensive price, and it was. Those other crappy leather straps and another crappy red pair I had once were basically like rubber bands. These MKS Alpha Sports are like parachute cord. They should considering rating toe straps with a lb. test raiting like fishing line. I guess the only better straps I can imagine are the MKS Alpha Sport double straps, (not the soma double leather straps, those are shitty and non-laminated leather).

A summary of what I just ranted about.

Products I recommend

SRAM PC-1 BMX Chain $10
MKS Fit Alpha Sport Leather Toe Straps (not MKS Alpha Spirit) $90 (mine were $70 somehow)
MKS Sylvan Track Pedals $22

Products that are SHITTY GARBAGE

Soma Hellyer Track Pedals $60
Zefal Christophe Leather Toe Straps $7

Today I crashed my bicycle on market street and front when I was trying to look behind for cars then I biked into the muni track groove and went flying over my handlebars and face into the ground. I sprained my left pinky, scraped up my face and knocked the wind out of my lungs. I found myself laughing, and noticed it was rather difficult to LOL and breathe at the same time. It was probably karma for the horrible things I’ve done over the years.

Additionally, I was working on a generalized method for note detection on musical instruments (namely the trumpet and piano). I wanted to avoid modeling the instruments general envelope or wave form in any way; essentially avoid any kind of precomputations and training stages, and just rely on my very flimsy knowledge of psychoacoustics. The idea was to be able to play my trumpet into the computer and have it transcribed into sheet music. Needless to say, I inevitably failed, but I did come up with some novel audio filters during my fruitless research.

Here’s the source code and some audio output example.

St. James Infirmary Redux

Glitchify / Pitch Non-Detection Code

I just got a new bicycle. I moved parts around from one of my old bikes, here’s two pictures of the rides after swaping things around.

felt tk2 frame, dura-ace track hubs, velocity aero-head rims, sugino 75 cranks, 50T fsa chainring, 16T rear miche cog, sugino lock ring, sella italia carbon seat, giant CF 10XL carbon stem and bars, cane creek headset, mks sylvan track pedals, mks fit alpha sport straps, sram pc-1 chain.

motobecane/fuji track frame, spinergy rev-x front wheel, alex da28 rim, formula rear track hub, sugino 75 cranks, 48T sugino 75 chainring, 15T dura-ace rear cog, dura-ace lock ring, brookes saddle, nitto 100 stem, nitto b123 track bars, mks sylvan track pedal, sram pc-1 chain.

This funny store across the street, Guru Guru sells funny stuff, to quote the website “Guruguru is a weird store, we open in weird hours (4-11pm), selling weird things.  The owner, Gabriel, hooked me up with one of these wooden LED clocks, pretty cool.  I’m always wondering what time it is when I’m in my living room, and now I wil be able to tell.  Acidjazz was the first to notice them over there, and he pointed out that they go for $150 on thinkgeek but Guru Guru has them for under $50, what a good deal.

Anyhow, you should stop in in the store and support one of the many new weird local tenderloin/nobhill (tendernob/tederloin heights/lower nobhill) businesses popping up.

“We know about christopher abad and we are not interested.”

I just got done browsing Internet Justice #1 by whoever wrote it (Great Council of Internet Superheros for lack of a better source). I’m glad to see people still have both the balls and the dedication to the original spirit of THE SCENE to put out these kind of zines still.  Too bad there isn’t as much of the showmanship and pomp in this, not even an extractor, its pretty much all business, straight to the mailspool dumps.

Since there isn’t an archive of it yet, heres a rapidshare link for the download.

http://rapidshare.com/files/136993583/justice01.txt.html

Oh man dudes. Zuni currently has Jimmy Nardello Peppers.  They are like a long sweet pepper, they kind of look like ripe hot peppers but are quite delicious and sweet and rarely spicy.  They grill them up with some oil.  These are a must eat. You must go to Zuni and demand some Jimmy Nardello Peppers.  It’s not likely they are available by themselves, but if you go demand them and say that Chris Abad says that you MUST have some then you have a small (1-2%) chance of having your demand met.