I hit the jumps up on St. Louis with the boys on Monday. My stomach wasn’t feeling right since lunchtime, and I was still on the weird funk I had all weekend. Saturated with fumes from painting all day at work, Scat was a little out of sorts, hitting the jumps a little off and landing at the edge of control. Ckucke managed to break something in his rear hub, possibly the axle or bearing cup – his rear hub got loose and the back-end felt all floppy. I tried cranking down on his Q/R, but it still seemed the same. Everything seemed relatively normal with Root. Like last week, a hint of a drizzle drifted down the ridgetop at one point, but didn’t get anything wet or sticky. Scat said it had been socked-in at mid-day, but if any precipitation fell, it was all soaked in and dried up by the time we arrived. At the end of the jump session, Scat and I had more-or-less managed to get back onto a somewhat normal footing. Continue reading ‘Jump Until Failure’
Monthly Archive for August, 2008
I’ve seen some other iterations of this glove design sold by other vendors before, but those have shiny carbon-patterned armor plates instead of the Kevlar-look cloth laminated plates that the Dakine Defenders have. Since I’ve been unable to find armored, box-fingered motocross gloves, when I saw these hanging in the back of McBike, I thought that they might be a possibility. There were only tiny sizes, so I waited a month until the backorder came in and Jarrel left a note on my toolbox that they had arrived! I snapped up a large pair that day. I tried on the XL’s, but the fingers were too long. Initially, the large felt tight for some reason. This was odd, since there was enough space at the knuckles as I could move the armor plates even while making a fist. The fingers weren’t too small in girth, since I could pinch the fabric. Odd. Maybe it was the way the fabric folded when the fingers were bent. In any case, the tight sensation went away after wearing them for a half hour, and it didn’t come back on subsequent wearings. Continue reading ‘Dakine Defender MTB Gloves’
Bwahaha, I can’t believe I let this one go by till now! Cropping up in fansubs, an OAV series titled Detroit Metal City. Designs and art are ugly style, ala Initial D, but it fits. I’m sure it’s completely intentional as Studio 4C is well capable of some outstanding artistic work. About a recent college graduate following his dream to perform in a band, but it’s not going in quite the direction he wished. Outrageous and hilarious, and yet with all good humour, there’s a hint of reality. Death metal with a Japanese slant. Who knows what’s really behind the paint!
Oh shoots, I just discovered there’s a live action movie that should be out too, complete with Gene Simmons cameo!
Might just have to get the soundtrack. Hey Roy, cosplay outfit for you!
Good Job! Saw a Robert’s Hawaii driver weaving through traffic on Likelike in Kalihi in his “short bus” with kids onboard because he was too busy playing with his smartphone/iPhone to hold the wheel with two hands. He couldn’t stay in his own lane or out of the gutter.
(0)
This past saturday, August 23rd was a culture day, albiet a late start culture day. The plan was to check out the Dragon Boat races. Gave Derek a call and didn’t end up at Ala Moana until noon. This year’s event was rather ill publicized and I would never have known about it, and it seems neither did anyone else. The park was filled with a usual weekend end of summer crowd. When I got to the center area, other than participants there didn’t seem to be anyone else there for the races. It was lunch break time so nothing was going on at the moment. I decided to stroll on down to McCoy Pavillion where the Greek Festival, which I did know about from radio spots and print media. Continue reading ‘Dragons and Beer’
Well, mom took the Prius in second time in as many weeks. It had been giving warning lights every blue moon, but it finally got bad couple weeks ago and refused to move. It was towed to Toyota, and looking at the service invoice all they did was hook it up to diagnostics, cleared codes, looked up for any service advisories, and sent it on its merry way almost a week later. Less than a week later pile of warning lights came on and I took it for test drive and it was running only on electric. Mom made appointment and took it into Toyota earlier this week. Came back and this time they said the main battery was bad, some leaky cell(s) and corroded wiring. Replaced under warranty, thank goodness as those batteries set you back around $4000. The bad thing with all this technology is its pretty darn hard for the home mechanic to do anything with them, and they’re (hybrid esp) are pretty sensitive. If sensors detect too much out of whack, it shuts it all down. Gone are the days of driving a belching, smoking, running on half cylinders car, which I suppose isn’t a bad thing. Anyway, lets see if this finally fixed things on the Prius. Continue reading ‘Cars & Technology’
I was at Kuakini Medical Center the other day, and passed the bulletin board where they have rotating displays. It was employee photo contest time, so I slowed down to take a look. This was the second round of pictures. There are often some interesting travel shots, and on rare occasion, a fascinating composition or impressive technical work. This time around, the picture of an older, rounder fellow riding an Ellsworth Truth down a rock face caught my attention. I immediately recognized the location as the angled boulder face along the climb-out after the boulder garden on the Ditch inner loop. It was an unremarkable shot, and the title was like some tagline straight out of the Ellsworth catalogue. The roll-in itself isn’t scary-technical (ride the mystery drop-in for scary), but I’m sure it was enjoyable for the rider. I momentarily thought, “WTF – it’s some old fat guy on an Ellsworth at Ditch,” before realizing, that’s like a third of our riding group including myself! Okay, Root’s not fat. Well, glad to see yet another Ellsworth out at Ditch, in addition to the Toyota truck guy and us three.
A faint drizzle drifted down from the wall of dark clouds hanging above the back of Manoa valley. Unlike last week, the clouds looked settled in their pockets near the mountaintops, so it was unlikely that rain would follow us down the trail. We passed Kevyn and his white Santa Cruz finishing his day in the parking lot on the ride up. After gearing up, we headed off down the mainline. There was a little more light out since it wasn’t as overcast, so I was able to pick out my line better. Root was tardy arriving at Ckucke’s, making our start time a later than last week. To avoid riding down in the dark with only LED blinky lights, we limited our jump session to a few runs, then headed off down the hill before the light began to fade. Dropping the taco jumps then backtracking uphill to do the first left, we essentially retraced last week’s ride. Continue reading ‘Crowded House’
A full moon on Saturday night meant it was time for an evening ride. I met Chris and Root out at Wailuna in the late afternoon. Ckucke, Jeff, and Sara were off-island, and Scat was otherwise occupied. A small group and a fast pace would be advantageous, since I discovered at the last minute that my Niterider battery had an issue. I had plugged it in the day before after Chris called me with the ride plans, but it was still flat. The multimeter said the charger was turning out the correct voltage, but the battery was only outputting around 6 volts. The battery was quite old, so one or more cells had probably gone bad. As we rolled out, the sun was still high in the sky, but the temperature was bearable. A strong wind was blowing downhill. The road climb from the park was quick, and the trail climb went smoothly. Either our pace was a bit higher than normal so I didn’t have time to fully recover, or I wasn’t quite on it. Many of the climbs took the wind out of me and sent the legs into burn. Continue reading ‘Ride into Twilight’
I know I’ll take serious sh!t for writing this, but are “Harajuku Lovers” bags and “tokidoki” bags from Le Sportsac the exclusive realm of overweight older single women?
(0)