I was testing out some template changes to The World's Only Cybermorphic Weblog (new archive menu! Flickr photos!) when I found an old post that could use some follow-up.

Here's the updates: The Park Tool levers eventually bent as well, and though I still use them, I just bought some replacement levers, this time Zefals. So far, I'm crediting cheapness over quality.

The cat still gets insulin twice a day, but surprisingly doesn't mind much. Okay, sometimes it bites me when I inject it, but it doesn't flee from me when it's injection time. Quite the opposite, disturbingly enough.

I have been comped two sets of bike socks this year, and they're very nice. If you ever want to buy me a random small gift, bike socks with an amusing graphic on them will do nicely.

I haven't seen Strider since that chance meeting nearly a year ago, so I should write him. And the last pinball I played was Pokemon Pinball for the Game Boy, which I have been playing rather a lot.

Sorry about the lack of blogging. I think my recent pictures adequately describe my week. Note that the Date and Time stamps on those photos are accurate.

Having reassembled the Auto-Mini as a project for keith, I took it for a test ride today and was reminded of my one complaint about the machine: it managed to feel simultaneously overgeared and undergeared at various times. I assumed this was the miracle of being a heavy, clunky folding bike.

But today, I was giving it one last ride for fun, and I took a closer look at the rear hub. It's a Sachs Torpedo Duomatic. Eh? With a name like that, it has to be a multi-speed hub, right? But I had always discounted that idea because there was no shifting mechanism. But today I took a closer look, and watched the holes in the sprocket to see if they stayed aligned with the oil fitting on the hub. No! That meant it had to have internal gearing, for nerdy bike reasons.

Google to the rescue. It's a "kickback" hub. The shifting mechanism is a light backpedal, which pops it from one gear to the other. Remarkable, and suddenly much more functional. An exploded view.

It still doesn't fold very well, but at least it has two speeds.

A pretty good week. My godfather, who I have not seen for about 16 years, came out for a visit, and we had a lot of fun catching up. His youngest son came, too. We spent the weekend doing the usual crazy stuff: aquarium, La Casa Gelato, night market (their first exposure to the weirdness that is bubble tea, among other things), and Robson Street. Fun for all.

Today was the penultimate Tuesday Nighter, and the last points-bearing one. So these results are final. My second place in Cat 4, is, with some provisos, something to be proud of. And I am. I finished the season with a bang, winning the last race (and coming a few brain cells and muscle fibers short of the prime, too). Let's call it Suck 1 for the race, and overall, a Suck 2 season. I did not met my (very aggressive!) stated goals for the season, but I'm happy.

Tonight's win was interesting, for reasons that go beyond boring "I sprinted and beat some other guy" cycling chatter. The actual circumstances were pretty simple: the big fast guy who won the prime and sat in all race unwound his sprint at the right time and was well clear of everyone, while I came from a marginal position (maybe seventh out of the last corner) drafted as well as I could, and then went full sprint.

I won the sprint by very little, catching the big fast guy by surprise with my come-from-nowhere victory. But the win was cemented early in my sprint, when my mental state flipped from "I hope I can catch him" to "I will catch him."

It's not that victory was a certainty: it was that absolute confidence that I could win made it possible for me to win. Confidence was the difference between me and second place today, and the lesson is learned.

Sorry for the bike content, Keith.

After Gord's suggestions, I have grabbed a couple of books by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Flow and Finding Flow. We'll see what I learn, but it should be a nice point to return to some of my ideas from last month.

My food and exercise journal. Let's see how long I keep this up.

It helps that I'm starting this public insanity when I've never been more fit. Friday is treat day, so watch those for the really wacky food consumption patterns.

Not recommended for mission-critical presentations.

And people ask me why I always seem to be grumpy about Powerpoint.

Okay, I am a darned fine blogger. Easily in the top ten, I know.

But the best blog in the world? The very best? More weird than Eric? More eclectic than Colby? Funnier car obsessions than Coop? More timewasting than Gord?

No contest. Mr. Jalopy's Hoopty Rides. I am in perfect concord with his aesthetic. I want his garage. I am so jealous that he found a complete pinball machine in someone's trash.

Hoopty Rides. For all your insanity needs.

I sometimes find that very small obstacles to task completion still stop me from task completion. I call the process of getting rid of these obstacles "friction reduction."

Remember - overthinking is the enemy of blogging. Don't think. Blog. Oh dear.

Gord says the secret ingredient missing from this post was flow. He's right.

Flow is your friend. I'll be reading Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book shortly (the library where I work has it).

About a week ago, I had a neat phone conversation with my father. There was the usual detail-oriented banter (advice on replacing a car battery, mostly), and we drifted into a conversation about his teenage passion, control-line model airplanes.

What followed (with diversions into some amusing stories of a recent old-timers flying meet) was one of the most remarkable insights into my father that I have had. He lit up when describing his passion in a way few people do. I was fascinated.

There's something to that: I've had some slightly scary conversations with fellow bike racers who admitted that they never felt more alive, or like anything mattered more than cycling. It's a scary revelation, especially if you're a perfectly normal person trying to convince family members that your hobby is just something you do to keep your weekends busy.

Why does this happen? Well, one explanation is that modern life is sufficiently unhazardous as to give us the leisure to take our leisure seriously. For men especially, I think that this sort of competitive, obsessive endeavour (especially when combined with a substantial adrenaline rush) is an easy thing to respond to. It's the same sort of draw as a video game, but with a stronger communal element, more visceral competition, and better graphics. Also, cycling specifically hurts old bones less than rugby (usually), and gives you a better waistline than golf.

Sometimes it's important to keep your passions in perspective, but sometimes it can be fun to take them just a little too seriously. Just don't tell anyone what you're doing.

Also, ask your parents about what they did when they were young. I'm talking to you, Supafamous. Ask your dad about his motorcycle racing.

This post is not about bikes, as keith pointed out that my recent posts were running about 50% bike content. I'll try to work out my obsessions elsewhere for a while.

Today's lesson is this: the Good Thing is not very user-serviceable!

Battery started to die on the car, so I replaced it. $100 including tax and envirolevy from my everybody's favourite retailer.

I've never had to borrow a shop manual from the library to change a battery before. The good news is that you don't have to remove the fender, which I thought might actually be part of the procedure. You just have to unbolt and push around the power steering fluid reservoir, plus the plastic engine shroud, and then wrestle a 50-pound battery sideways and up in a confined space. Yeugh. I made the task extra hard by not having the proper battery-power preservation tool (if the battery is unplugged for very long, the car goes brain-dead and can require a service-code reset, a delightfully expensive two-minute procedure). Instead, I used a ghetto method of clipping an emergency jumpstart unit to the terminals and then very carefully removing them from the old battery. The battery had better last its warrantied five years, because I don't want to deal with it until then.

Oh, and here's the vehicle I really want: the Gixxerkart. It's a go-kart with more horsepower than the above-mentioned car, thanks to the generous donation of an engine by a motorcycle. The resulting vehicle weighs considerably less than the original motorcycle, and I think the site has some fairly impressive videos of the kart getting very sideways and going very fast. This is the craziest ride this side of Rainey and Lawson's 250 GP superkarts

Did I have a good Tuesday night race tonight? Suck Level 1, baby! We are talking absolute minimum Suck.

How non-suck are we talking? Well, the race noodled around for the first half, until the prime sprint, which I won, again, like I do every week. This week I did it by being second wheel out of the bottom corner and, er, sliding my rear wheel sideways when I ran wider than I wanted to and grabbed the rear brake. Disturbingly, this worked, albeit with lots of noise. That's right, I pulled a controlled e-brake drift on a bicycle. Professional rider! Closed course! Do not attempt! Not even you, Supafamous! Dumb luck aside, I was then heads-up with a rider who had pretty much pulled the whole pack along for half a lap, so I attacked and left him for dead. I took the prime by a zillion bike lengths, though how much of that can be ascribed to the sheer terror I insipred in the pack by nearly stacking it in front of them is an open question.

After that, I spent a long time just sitting near the front of the pack while a few half-hearted attacks went off, Fast Johnny managed to fall down in front of me on a straightaway (between this and his epic solo prime crash at Yaletown, we have a lot to tease him about...) and then one wholehearted attack got away. Teammate Chris chased that mother down, and in one of the most agonizing rides I have ever seen, slooowly caught the escapee.

With a teammate up the road, I had nothing to do but sit in. When Chris finally got caught, we were now hunting a rider who had been out solo for nearly half the race. The pack finally started paying attention, the usual highly impatient types chased, and the pack . . . nearly got him, but not quite.

But one more attack on the last lap, in the usual place on the lower section of the course, and I followed. This fast wheel towed me through my favourite corner (no bobbles thank you) and within sight of the clearly cracked escape artist. I powered up and dropped the pack (you can do that when you've been sitting in all race) and started moving towards the last man ahead of me.

And as we got onto the finishing straight, the blighter started sprinting! Against me! So, I turned on my sprint, and it turns out my new sprinting technique (standing up) is unstoppable! In an unbelievably heart-breaking finish (for him, not me; I loved it) I caught and passed my opponent within yards of the finish line. Alessandro Petacchi's train couldn't have made a more perfectly timed catch. I punctuated the moment with some disturbingly visceral shouts. Must work on a cool finishing move.

Teachable moment: the reason the ideal is to catch an escaped rider as close to the line as possible (if you're a sprinter) is twofold. First, you minimize the work you need to do to catch them. Second, you prevent any counterattacks from trying a last-kilometre escape on you. It effectively controls the pack, too, because nobody is likely to escape and attack the pack for the glory of second place.

The important lessons of this race were teamwork (Chris' long breakaway meant I got to not do any work), patience (if you wait long enough in Cat 4, someone else will almost always do the work you want done), and control. While Chris was up the road, I sucked onto the wheel of every rider attacking out of the pack. This meant the individual in question couldn't usefully attack the riders up the road, because he would drag me up there in his draft.

Why could I counter every attack, strike out for the prime, and outsprint both the back and the escapee at the end of the race? Well, partly because I've got a good (for Cat 4) sprint, and partly because I'm strong, and mainly because I didn't do any work in the race. Also, because I got lucky and didn't crash in my botched cornering move on the approach to the prime.

Winning is so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend doing it.