Triple Bypass, Triple Chainring
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Last weekend I went on a bicycle ride along the peak to peak highway in Colorado. The old scenic bypass is a great north-south route between Black Hawk and Estes Park, and it offers great views of Long's Peak and surrounding beauties. I was fortunate enough to acquire a new(er) road bike for bike season 2007: a Lemond Alpe D'Huez. After a few rides up the local hill, I thought this baby was light enough and I had legs enough to take the Triple Bypass.
The Peak to Peak Highway told me a different story, a short story, a one-word story: NO. To make a short story long, then, tonight a good friend and I, using a 14 inch 3 pound framing hammer and a slotted screwdriver, changed out the bottom bracket and added a triple chainring to the Lemond. 10,000 feet of lung busting elevation gain? Here I come!
Labels: bicycles, colorado, projects
written by Eric Mills at 00:21 
Slideshow Update
Sunday, May 20, 2007
This older version with the options I spoke of in the last post:
Created with Paul's flickrSLiDR.
Labels: flickr, Photography
written by Eric Mills at 10:15
Flickr Slideshow Now Sucks
I have never, ever had anything negative to say about Flickr. I'm sorry, however, because now I do. Their old slideshow rocked. This new one, well, sucks. I liked the colors, I liked the white background, I even liked the purple (pink?) and blue balls spinning around eachother as a way of letting you know things were happening. Am I the only one who thinks things have spun around backwards? This feels too Yahoo-ish...
And, who wants to know that this photo (to the left) is named wv020? I say bring back the slider for speed, bring back the choices, and why fix something that isn't broken?--Eric Mills likes his slideshows customizable, which is why he dropped photobucket in the first place. He is also always on the lookout for good sites gone wrong.
Labels: design, flickr, Photography, web
written by Eric Mills at 00:18
Foxing It Up
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
We here at Mills Bros headquarters have extolled the virtues of Firefox before. Over at /dev/null, however, they have the ultimate lineup of browsers, and still Firefox comes out at number one. Check out the list:
I’ve been using Firefox since the very early days. If I don’t remember wrong I moved over to Firefox from Opera when the version number still was around 0.6. It rocked at that time, even though a few crashes and strange behaviours had to be accepted. I guess it didn’t help that I nearly daily downloaded a new nightly build from their FTP site, ensuring I always knew what new stuff which would pop up in the new releases. I’ve been using Epiphany, Konqueror, Safari, Opera‘, Internet Explorer, Camino, Flock, Omniweb, Mozilla (now rebreanded to SeaMonkey), Netscape, Dillo, Mosaic, Amaya, Galeon, ICEBrowser, Arena, and Chimera (plus text-based Links, Lynx and w3m) in addition to Firefox, but no other web browser have given me such a capability of customizing my own web-browsing experience, thus also making it personal and tailored for my needs and preferences.
Labels: firefox, theinternets, web
written by Eric Mills at 23:38
Signage: Foolish Craig
Friday, May 11, 2007
Eh? I'm foolish, so what?
Labels: CJ, colorado, Rothgery, signage
written by Eric Mills at 23:26
Signage: Oma's Pizza
I'm not sure that Oma was ever too interested in making pizza, but this sign from Bradenton, Florida is funny, nonetheless. (You can click-through on the photo to see it full-sized and in its original context.)
Labels: oma, Rosa Muller, signage
written by Eric Mills at 23:11
Energy Savings
Sunday, May 6, 2007
After finally remembering to switch the hot water heater in our house to "vacation" on our last vacation, I've tried to be a little more energy conscious. To accomplish a small start, I picked up a few lower energy light bulbs and also took a quick inventory of the power-suckers in our house. Deciding that the basement computer has to stay on for the majority of the day, I found SwitchOff, installed it hassle-free, and set it to 4am (the time after which the computer does no more housekeeping tasks). Admittedly, the computer will not save me the most energy. Saving money, it is important to note, is not the goal. My goal with this small exercise is to save energy.
Thus, instead of the computer, I decided to look into my lighting habits. Ironically, on the same day that I decided to add a few low-impact CFL bulbs to our lighting repertoire, Snopes.com (the post-humous-Faulkner-character's eponymous site of urban legends) decided to run an article [link contains popups] on the bulbs' mercury content. Whew, that was a wordy sentence. The short story? The site found no extreme danger of mercury, and with an average savings of around $45.00 / year it is one of three things I'm working on to save a few nickels per kilowatt hour. The others? Unplugging the wine fridge until company comes, splicing in a programmable thermostat, and trying to make the most of Great Stuff, which truly is great stuff.
--Eric Mills
Labels: colorado, energy, energy consumption, trial
written by Eric Mills at 20:32
Benefits of a Restless Brother
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
No one has ever accused Eric of being too calm, or sitting still too much. He is the person that presses every button and opens all compartments when getting into a car (OK, I do this too). Given a few minutes with a bike, he will either have fixed everything wrong with it, or caused everything on it to fall off. Lend him your laptop for a moment, and all your saved passwords are cleared and 3 new programs are installed (admittedly useful ones).
But I have to say there are benefits of having a restless brother. Especially when you confine him in the middle of nowhere in West Virgina. Under these circumstances he is left with little to do, so after borrowing your bike, using your laptop, and mowing your lawn, he is bound to start a project of some sort. In this case it was helping me organize my garage. I think the results speak for themselves:
Thanks Eric! See the results of the whole project.
