It’s a little hard to make it out in the picture, but it says “36t” on the big cog.

That’s the much ballyhooed Shimano SLX HG-61 cassette. With my monkey’s mountain triple (FC-M460) cranks, I have stupendously low gearing (in inches):

The lowest gear is 17.8″ For most people, this is probably insanely low, but I am not like most people.

I am fat, lazy, and slow. And I live in a mountainous area. I suspect that low gear will see lots of use.

Shimano say you need a fancy “Shadow” derailleur to make this cassette work. Shimano are full of it.

This is just a regular Deore derailleur. I screwed the B-tension screw all the way in, and it fits. Just barely.

Shimano also warns you that the 22/36 combination can generate so much torque that you might damage your rear hub. They then suggest that you should buy one of their fancy 29er-specific rear hubs.

I think I have the hub situation well in hand already.

I took it for a test spin around the block today, and everything seems to work. Hopefully, I’ll have a chance to take it out to the woods this week and see if I am able to spin up some hills that I have had to walk up before.

Lebanon Valley Rails to Trails has announced plans to extend the Lebanon Valley Rail-Trail along a path that follows the abandoned Lebanon & Tremont rail line and would continue to Lickdale, where it would link to the Swatara Rail-Trail.

The Swatara Rail-Trail also uses the old Lebanon & Tremont roadway and continues for another 10 miles to Pine Grove, most of that length within Swatara State Park.

It’s a scant 3 miles on-road from the Swatara Rail trail to the Stony Creek Trail. When this extension is done, Lebanon is going to be the hub of a nice little trail network – about 60 miles of trails, by my calculations.

You can help make it happen faster by kicking in a few bucks.

I’ve ridden it a few times in the past 2 weeks just for something different. I had forgotten how much fun it is to take it to the woods and run over rocks and stuff.

I think I’m keeping it.

I took it up to Stony Creek today, and made a foolhardy attempt to climb Stagecoach road (steep!). I abandoned the attempt after about 100 yards, when I thought I was having a stroke.

Here I am all red-faced and sweaty after the attempt.

I’m thinking of getting one of Shimano’s new-fangled CS-HG61 cassettes for it. It’s unlikely that having 2 more teeth on the low gear would make that much of a difference, but it probably wouldn’t hurt, either.

Anyone know if this thing would work with a Phil Hub and a plain-old Deore dérailleur? I have a 34-tooth 30-tooth low gear now, and don’t have any problems with it.

Anyhow, 17 miles for the day, and I like my Monkey again.

There’s a big PDF map of the proposal.

The map is a little hard to read, but it looks like the some of the trail system will be on-road. There might be more details in the meeting minutes, but they are not yet posted on the township website.

If you look closely at the map near Cornwall Center, it shows a dashed yellow line branching off the LVRT to the southeast and dissapearing off the edge of the map.

Dashed yellow means proposed LVRT extension.

Interesting. I wonder how far it goes?

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular “e-pub” standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

I call Shenanigans on this line of argument. Kindle supports PDF and plain text files, for heaven’s sake! Plain text files don’t have Whispersync either, but it’s still nice to have support for other formats.

It’s not as if adding ePub support would be hard, either.

Want to see how hard it is to support ePub? Follow along.

1. Go download the ePub version of this book. It’s a good one, trust me.

   

2. rename the file from .epub to .zip

   

3. Open the zip
   

See, ePub is just a zip file full of XHTML.

So what’s the deal, can the Kindle not render HTML?

Nope. The new Kindle comes with a webkit browser, so I’m pretty sure it can handle HTML rendering.

There’s really no excuse for the Kindle not to support ePub.

I still have an old-ass first generation Kindle, that won’t even read PDFs, let alone ePubs. I read a lot of PDFs for work, and the old Kindle isn’t going to cut it anymore.

Although Amazon added PDF support for Kindle a few months ago, they neglected to issue the update for Kindle 1, to my great consternation.

I suppose I could stomp out in a huff and buy a nook, but I already have something like 60 books in the Kindle format.

So, despite my sense of indignation at the lack of ePub support and general grumpiness at being overlooked for the PDF upgrade. I went ahead pre-ordered one of the shiny new Kindles.

Vendor lock-in is a bitch.

People walking or riding bicycles in the area near the work release center, including the Harrisburg Greenbelt, should use caution, police said, and should not approach the animal.

Be careful out there.

There are peacock feathers on the chain guard,

on the fenders,

On the bell and grips…

The design from the grips is carried over on the saddle.

The saddle is wide and springy.

There are bigger versions of these pictures here.

We’re taking it to the rail trail tomorrow night. All the other girls will be jealous.

The episode I was listening to talked about Poplar Forest, which was Jefferson’s second home / retreat. Today it’s sort of a museum, and I noticed that it wasn’t yet added to OSM. The Yahoo images weren’t very good, but I could see the building, and I knew from the podcast that it was an octagon with a long rectangle sticking out the side.

So, I drew a crude octagon, then told JOSM to arrange the nodes in a circle. I think it came out pretty nicely.

Some time ago, I added a node for Monticello to the map, so now you can plan your Jeffersonian vacation with OSM.

I think Mr. Jefferson would like Openstreetmap. After all, he commissioned Louis and Clark expedition to map the American West.

I’m pretty sure he would have been in favor of share-alike licensing, too.

He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.

No doubt if Alexander Hamilton were alive today, he’d own stock in Navteq, plan his travels on Bing, and call us all “intellectual voluptuaries.”

We ordered one of these today:

It certainly is green.

Anyhow, her old Mixte is probably going to be for sale soon. Here are some pictures of it.

It’s lugged. It’s steel. It’s French.

You know you want it.

That was in January. It was my first day of work for the year. It was supposed to be my way of starting off the new year being healthy, green, and weird. New Years resolutions and all that jazz.

I was laid up with injuries until March, and then we got some blizzards. So, I have an excuse for not riding for three months.

I don’t have much of an excuse for not commuting in April, May, or June. Laziness mostly, maybe a little bit of fear. Getting hit by a car is pretty scary, and it makes you overestimate the risks involved every time you ride with traffic.

I’m taking a slightly different route now, and avoiding the intersection where I got hit.

Anyhow, it feels good to be back at it.