Whipped Cream Difficulties

My great and good friend Joe D. left a long comment on last night’s cycling post. Because I believe in rewarding hard work, I’m promoting his comment to a post. (That also gives me a chance to do some annotation.)

You could bike to work. If you do that, they let you use the showers in the fitness center for free. You’ll need to bring your own towel, though.

Yeah, I could bike to work, if I was working. I did give some thought to trying that, just as an experiment, when I was still working for Four Letter Computer Company. Google Maps has the distance as about 14 miles and 90 minutes.

I did the bike-to-work thing pretty much daily for 6 years. 8 miles each way. Saved a buttload of gas, got in shape, etc. But since they made me start working from home, I haven’t been biking nearly as much. I miss it.

I’m not exactly basing my employment decisions on the ability to bike to work, but I’ve seen some jobs that look promising and might allow for a more reasonable bike commute.

I only recently got a cellphone. If I’d had one when I was commuting, I’d have used it to do all my trip logging. I did install MyTracks, though. It seems to work well. I rode for a couple of hours last weekend, and it didn’t seem to affect the battery life that much. Even if it did, I bought myself a http://kiwichoice.com/portable-chargers/kiwi-u-powered for my birthday. It should more than double my battery life.

That Kiwi looks nice. I have a couple of USB batteries that should work if I need more cellphone power: I used to use those to run the USB Christmas lights at 4LCC, since we couldn’t have plug-in lights. If I were employed, though, I’d give serious thought to the Kiwi as a backup/bug-out/prepper device.

Oh yeah. Speaking of cellphone, the one I get was with Republic Wireless. You have to buy the phone for $250, but it’s $20/month for unlimited talk/text/data thereafter. The phone (Motorola Defy XT) is a couple of years behind the curve, but works well enough. I wish it had a bigger screen, but other than that, it’s fine. The reason it’s so cheap is that if you’re connected to a wifi network, it will make all the phone calls via voip over wifi. Otherwise, it uses the cell network.

My current service is with Sprint, but I’m off contract and will be considering a phone upgrade and/or provider change once I’m employed again. Republic sounds worthy of consideration.

If you’re looking for panniers, get yourself a this: http://www.topeak.com/products/Bags/MTXTrunkBagDXP

Oh, I am delighted to hear you say this, Joe. I have actually been seriously considering both the Topeak MTX Trunk Bag EXP as well as the MTX Trunk Bag DXP. I will probably pick up one of those once I’m employed. From what I’ve seen at REI, the DXP is about $30 more, but has a larger capacity than the EXP.

I keep a spare tube, tools, and such in the center compartment, and if I need more storage, the sides unzip and fold out into saddlebags. There’s enough room to hold a laptop and a complete change of clothes, including shoes and a towel. Best of all, it unhooks from the rack with the push of a button allowing you to carry it in with you.

Yeah. Currently, I have an under-seat bag that holds tools and spares, but it doesn’t fit with the current rack, so I’ve sort of South Austin engineered it onto that rack. I like the large central compartment of the Topeak bags very much. The one minor problem I see with the DXP and EXP is that I’ll probably want to change out the current rear rack for a Topeak compatible one; that’s not a deal breaker, though I am a little confused as to exactly which rack I need to use with the DXP/EXP.

One additional point in the cellphone vs. dedicated computer debate that I didn’t think of last night: a cellphone, at least in theory (we’ll see how this works out) offers you audio capability as well.

Some people I know believe that the only sound you should care about when riding is the ambient sound around you. Other people like to listen to music to pump themselves up, or perhaps podcasts as a diversion. I don’t fall on either side; I have iPods, but those require headphones or ear buds, and I find the idea of plugging one’s ears while riding an evolutionarily BAD idea. I kind of like listening to the ambient sounds around me, but if I can add the soothing sounds of Siracusa or squirrels, that would be a big win.

Or, of course, I could just play some appropriate music to get myself pumped up for those hills…

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 24th, 2013 at 9:50 am and is filed under Cycling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.