Today was the day I decided to ramp up my mileage for my weekly rides. I’ve felt good the past couple of weeks, and ready to increase my mileage. Both my legs and my lungs felt ready for it. In addition, it was a nice day, and I decided to ride from home to the trails. To get a longer ride in without being out later, I had to start earlier. Since it was nice out, I could do that easily enough. I set out from home and picked up the Lanana Creek Trail at its Main St. trailhead. I headed north and saw a number of other folks enjoying the trail on their bikes or on foot. Unfortunately, I flatted my rear tire after not long on the dirt. I had just inflated my tire, so I thought I may have burped some air. I reinflated it and checked for trouble. Sure enough, I heard a loud hissing sound. I looked around for the source of the escaping air and found a puncture. That’s odd…I’ve got sealant in there, it should have sealed this little hole. It looked about the size you’d expect from a piece of broken glass, but the hole was clear. Well, that’s why I carry a spare tube. So I had to pull the tire off and insert a tube. While I had the tire off, I double-checked that a piece of glass wasn’t poking through the tire. Fixing that would have killed the evening. When I got the tire off, I saw why I got a puncture…my sealant was dried up. There were no boogers of any sort, so it appears as though I just didn’t put enough sealant in to start with. I’ll have to remedy that. The tire was clear, however, so I tossed in a tube, inflated to a comfortable pressure, and continued on my ride.
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Okay, I feel I can finally write about this because it’s finally been resolved. Just before my Hawaii vacation, my Edge 705 crapped out on me. I wanted to load maps for the area I planned on riding on my vacation, and the GPS just died when I plugged it in. I had recently updated to firmware 3.2. I plugged my GPS in, got the “bleep” and then a few seconds later, I got a second “bleep”. The drive for the GPS never came up. GPS Tracklog linked me to this article, which I thought was interesting and relevant to this site. Interestingly, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke predicted the use of satellites as repeaters of radio signals. In August of 1956, he expanded on the idea, predicting both satellite TV and GPS. Wicked, huh? Now here’s an interesting gadget that addresses some issues I’ve had with using an iPod Touch or an iPhone in the field as a GPS. GPS apps have been available since the beginning, I think. At first, the iPhone calculated location based on cell tower triangulation. It wasn’t long before Apple put a GPS chip into the iPhone and that has only resulted in an increase in the number of people who use their smartphones as a GPS in the boonies. Android phones and others have GPS chips in them, also. Yesterday, Garmin announced (officially) their replacement of the popular and well-regarded 60 series of GPS receivers. The announcement got a lot of press at GPSTracklog today. There’s been some buzz lately about some new GPS receivers that look like they’re going to replace the venerable GPSMap 60 and 76 series models. Garmin has so far confirmed a 78, the replacement for the 76. As of now, there are only just rumors about a replacement to the 60, a supposed 62. GPSFix has some informative posts worth reading if you’re interested in this sort of thing. There’s a post for the 78, and one for the expected 62. Another Sunday, another weekly ride. This week was much cooler than previous weeks. It was overcast and threatening to rain all day. It spat on us a little, but didn’t really rain until we finished our ride. I’ve been working on planning a hiking trip for this trail. Unfortunately, there’s really not many good maps out there. I found a SINGLE map, but it was just an image without coordinates in the margins. How is someone supposed to use a map like this? It’s really not a map if you think about it…it’s just a picture. You can’t even use a compass with it. But I suppose the folks who created want you to buy the real thing, but that’s still a bit dangerous. Ok, so it’s not REALLY my first ride. But it’s my first ride since kicking leukemia in the @$$ almost one year ago (dx on 3/10/09 and remission on 4/10/09). Myself and Scott Morris have been having some troubles with some .gpx files lately and I am going to be using this page to try out some different files. I don’t want this to screw up the display of the main page, so I hope to put enough intro text in here to bump the map(s) onto their own page. |
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