Sold

This bicycle has been sold and is no longer available. Thank you for your interest.

Backstory

Back in Grad school (fall 2001), I bought this bike for $380 and rode it every day to and from my office. (I then spent some money on the upgrades of lights, etc. — see specs below.) It served me well, but I neglected it somewhat when I got my job after I graduated. When I moved up to Ithaca, I bought a new bike that suited me a little better, and so I'm looking to make some space by getting rid of this one.

Specs

The bike is an aluminum framed mountain bike (a GT Timberline) which measures 18" from the center of the crank to the center of the top bar. I believe that this means that it corresponds to a "size 18" in some sizing systems. For reference, I'm 6' (183cm) tall and it felt just the slightest bit short on me — but I like to ride with my legs very extended. It has shimano gear shifters, though unfortunately they're grip-shifters, with 3 gears on the crank and 7 on the wheel for 21 speeds. The headlight on it works, though I can't swear to how well the rechargeable NiMHs in it will hold a charge. It's got a rear LED red tail-light (with 3 modes — full on, flash, and pulse) with reasonable fresh batteries in it. It's got a rear mud-flap and a mount-point for a front mud-flap (the original broke). The tires are very heavily treaded for use in off-road conditions (I used them to ride pretty comfortably when it was snowing out), but if you'd want to use the bike for mostly on-road activities, I would suggest changing the tires as these are a bit bumpy and would slow you down. The rear wheel has a double-thickness inner tube because I broke the original single-thickness inner tube going off of a hard curb (the front is still the original inner tube). The pedals have pretty good clipless straps on them that, while rusted, are pretty durable. Oh, yeah, it's got a kick-stand too.

Condition

It probably needs a tune-up, but I got it tuned up and rode it a bit at the end of last summer before I got my new bike. It spent the winter in-doors, so it should still be ridable now. In previous years it spent a lot of time out doors, so it has a little rust, but nothing structural (since the frame is aluminum, there's not much that could rust structurally) and I believe it doesn't mar the appearance much either.

When I last road it it road well — the wheels have zero wobble and the gear selectors would go all gears, though do have to push slightly hard to go to the largest gear on the crank. I believe that the cable is just improperly tightened. It's not a big deal in that the selector works every time, it just annoys me that it's not as perfectly smooth as when I bought it.

I haven't ridden it over the winter or spring, but since it spent the winter in my apartment (and thus wasn't subjected to excess humidity or to temperature swings), I expect that it should be in the same condition as when I last road it.

Asking Price

I'm asking $150 or best offer for the bike. Please use the contact page if you're interested.

Pictures

Here are some pictures which should give you a pretty good idea of what the bike is like. Click on each picture to see the full size image.

I'll try to update with pictures. Anyhow, my first month of being a married man has gone pretty well. Beth and are slowing getting the place in order. The living room area is mostly box-free and the piano is delivered. I still need to set up the speakers for the TV.

I got my bike tuned up and it's quite nice to ride again.

There's probably lots more, but it will be a lot more effective to use pictures than words, I think, so I'll update with some pictures soon.

Well, I've got it and it's set up (mostly). I still need to finish arranging the speakers. Anyhow, here are the pictures:







Note: the bizarre colors in the second and third picture are because I disabled the flash — I apologize for not re-taking them.

Life is certainly interesting. Apparently when I bought a ticket in a fund raiser for a wrestling club in a semi-local high school (people at work were selling the tickets), I got more than I bargained for. Yesterday I got a phone call saying that I won!

They're buying the 42" Plasma TV now, and will give me the appropriate information to arrange for delivery with the store (the prize includes the TV, a surround sound system, local delivery, and installation).

My plan is to not count my chickens until they're installed on my TV stand and playing DVDs, but this will be really cool if it works out. I don't think that I've ever won a raffle before.

Beth recently gave me my christmas present — a really nice new desk!

While it looked good, it didn't taste like much, unfortunately. On the plus side, I learned a few lessons:

1. Make the pizza large enough to fit on the stone, and no larger

2. add spices to the topping

3. don't use watery fresh mozarella

4. Don't make the pizza so large it falls off the side of the pizza stone

5. Actually use corn meal, rather than wheat flour, to keep the pizza from sticking to the stone

6. In fact, make the pizza small enough that there's some portion of the stone, however small, which is left uncovered.

7. If you make way too much dough, only use some of it to make the pizza.

At least it was only bland and oversized, not bad. ;-)

I figured that since a picture is worth a thousand words, and a thousand words would take more time than a picture, without giving me the chance to use my Mom's Nikon D70 more, I'd go with the picture route instead:





(note: only the stuff on the table (excluding the tablecloth, etc.) are my presents, the rest (e.g. the tiger) are just part of the room.)

Well, I've gotten the image editing interface now mostly working. It's in decent shape, I think, and the only thing missing the ability to save images. Other than that, it's going great! :-)

There's actually just some dumb bug somewhere — I think — which is causing the data not to be written. I'll figure it out monday.

But once I nail that bug, another major line will have been crossed. Step by step, inch by inch, I'm getting this thing done.

My current hope is to have the major work finished in late november or early december. We'll see if I can make it, but once the editing interface is finished (or at least when all of the important functionality is added) that will be a major step.

Work is coming along, though not as quickly as I would like. I'm nearly done with the image editing interface. Tomorrow I'm going to finish it off and integrate it into the sequence creation tool.

Tonight there are spare ribs in the oven.

Well, today Beth and I got up a little earlier and went to Hawk Mountain again. Yesterday we bought a family membership^* for a year, so admission is free, making it a very inexpensive hiking trip (not including gasoline costs, since it's about 45 minutes away). This time we did a much longer hike down the mountain and back up again, seeing the river of rocks (it's a field of large rocks which looks something like a river). It was a great hike that was a lot of fun, especially at the end where we took a minor detour and used the "escarpment trail" which requires "scrambling on rocks". Basically, the in places the trail consisted of the occasional spraypaint mark on a hillside of rocks at about a 50 degree angle. It was incredibly fun.

Actually, the entire trail we took was little more than a series of red spray-paint marks every 20' or so. In some places there were signs of wear, but by and large we were just trapsing through the woods on a guided tour. I don't think that I ever had so much fun hiking before, and I can't wait to do it again. It was a little harder on Beth because she didn't have very good boots, but she enjoyed it too. It's kind of funny that we only recently discovered a mutual interest in hiking, but it's incredibly convenient that we have it.

I also realized that I don't have a really good coat for hiking. I've been using my leather bomber jacket which I got at a Wilson's Leather outlet in Pittsburgh, but being a bomber jacket it rides up all the time and exposes the small of my back. The weather yesterday (raining) made me think of Australian raincoats, and today I was thinking about them as well. After doing a bit of research on the internet, I decided that I really want one.

It turns out that they're traditionally made of oil cloth. They're warm and great for rugged wear, and can be purchased for $182 (total price to your door) custom tailored to your measurements by an actual Australian company which uses 100% Australian ingredients. They're perhaps on the heavy side at 2kg (4.4lbs), but I've found heavier cloaks to be perfectly comfortable (come to think of it, I think that my leather bomber jacket weighs at least that).

While they're a bit in the pricey side, they're apparently very durable, very very weatherproof, and very easy to clean. Indeed, the cleaning instructions are, "The Oilskin fabric is very easy to look after, just treat it like a dog: wash it down with a hose and let it dry and look after it like a friend." Besides, $180 isn't too bad for a custom-made coat; they take your waste, chest, and arm length measurements, plus your weight and height, and make a coat to fit you. From what I gather, they fit very well, though I do have to admit that I'm gathering this from the customer testimonials on their page. :-)

Now, I would like to go hiking more, both because I really like hiking and because it is decent exercise, and God knows I could certainly use more exercise. I could really see a nice, weatherproof coat helping out both by making it more pleasant to go hiking in all types of weather and also as a motivation. And certainly it wouldn't hurt that hiking through the woods in a black australian workman's coat would look really good. :)

Of course, if I was going to do that, how could resist eventually getting a nice black kangaroo leather australian hat? Of course the hat wouldn't have to come immediately, my felted wool hat does reasonable well in the rain, though it goes get a bit wet after a while (it's described was water resistant, not waterpoof, as the australian hats are).

Anyhow, I hadn't mean to turn this post into a commercial for australian clothing, but it was really on my mind as I was hiking along. In any event, it's really great to be hiking again. I had forgotten how much I love hiking in the woods.




*Beth asked the person working at the counter, "Can I and my fiancé get a family membership?" The guy looked at us for a moment, then said, "Sure!" Thus we got a family membership for $40 when an individual membership costs $35. Beth and I figure that we're only 1 trip behind now (since admission costs $7/day), and have a year to do it in. It's such a beautiful area that we're pretty sure that it

Yesterday, Beth and I went to Hawk Mountain. We didn't see any hawks (though we did see a bunch of migrating robins), but it's a really beautiful area, even when its raining.

The Hawk Mountain trails are pretty different from most nature trails I've been on. At first I couldn't quite place it, but then it occurred to me that they're far less finished than state parks I've been to. I don't know whether it's because Hawk Mountain is a privately run organization, or because this is rural Pennsylvania or what, but parts of the trails are rocky, with offshoot trails that have signs on them which say, "the [name] trail requires scrambling on rocks". It was great!

As much as I enjoyed the trails themselves, the views were amazing. Every few hundred to few thousand feet, there would be a bunch of big rocks off on the side of the trail where you could go stand on them and look out over the valley and stuff (the rocks kept trees from growing below and getting into your way). We even saw a rainbow! (pictures at the bottom of the post).

On our way back, we stopped a Sonoco where Beth got some hot chocolate. It may have been because we were cold and rained on but happy, but that was tasty hot chocolate! Afterwards we had dinner at Buca di Beppo which is — to say the least — an interesting restaurant. The food is good, and not as expensive as, say, the Olive Garden (conveniently located across the road from Buca in Whitehall), but the really striking part is the wall decorations. The walls are absolutely covered in tasteless, italian themed stuff. Pictures make up the majority of it, but there are also statues and the occasional 3d-ish-picture (not quite a hologram, it still produces a 3D appearance, I think by compositing two pictures at slightly different angles). It's impressive how tasteless and in some cases offensive the pictures are.

Still, the food is really tasty and they have fabulous garlic bread (and bruschetta).

Pictures from Hawk Mountain:

I got the opportunity to show off some of my stuff at work today. Byron (my Boss) said that it was probably time to start showing people where we're going with the interface, since it's such a departure from the current interface. I got the impression that the idea is both to get lots of feedback and viewpoints early on in the process (which is a very good idea) and also to make sure that everyone knows where we're going.

We got a lot of good feedback and the new interface (which is still very incomplete) was generally well recieved, I thought. The consensus seemed to be that it will be much easier to use than the current generation. On the downside I'm still not good at explaining some of the additional power because I could tell that I was scaring a few people that it would be so complex that no one could use it. It's one of my major design goals that no complexity will be required for a task past what's inherently required for the task (for example, I can't design a user interface so easy to use that you can enter text without typing it in).

I think, though, that explaining the power will be much easier when I have working code that demonstrates it — I'm not very good at describing simple things simply. When there's something fairly simple and intuitive to look at, it will go a long way to making it clear that it really won't be overly complex or difficult to use. :-)

I'm also making decent progress, though I do think that I should be further along. It's a bit frustrating because there are a lot of interlocking bits and pieces that I have to keep bouncing around, filling out, so no particular piece of progress looks like much. That's OK, of course — it will look impressive enough when it's done — but it would be more fun if progress looked faster. :-)

My software is coming along at work. Unfortunately, for everything visible I do there's a lot of back-end work that goes into it which no one but me sees, but even so, I'm making some visible progress.

I refined the interface for dealing with the sign a bit (though some of it will need to be re-written once I actually write the scheduler, but for the time being I'm ignoring that portion of things). I finally came up with a decent interface to manage the libraries, and have a skeleton for that done. I hope to flesh that out tomorrow so that it's usable.

Once that's done, I'll probably begin on the scheduler. The scheduler is going to be a fair amount of work, though most of it will be detail work which isn't too hard; the real bear is going to be efficiently figuring out when schedules collide. I do think that I've mostly figured out how to do that, though.

Things are starting to come together. Once a few more pieces are in place, all of the work designing the system will really start to show its worth. I'm really getting excited. I think that this software system will really be some good work. The future, as always, remains to be seen, of course, but I think that I have legitimate reason to be optimistic.

Today's big even was getting my car inspected. It took about 4 hours and $430, but by 1pm I had succeeded. All it needed was a new breakpad for the front right tire, re-finishing of the rotors, and two new tires for the front wheels.

The flat tire (which I got last weekend) couldn't be fixed, so it was replaced with one of the old tires which was a hair above the wear line (i.e. still legal but not terribly safe on snow, and not legal for many more miles.) It's not, perhaps, an ideal solution, but if a spare tire will only last for 300-600 miles, that's still far better than your typical donut.

Incidentally, it was an interesting experience changing a tire. It was easier than I had expected it to be, though tires are also heavier than I expected them to be. After all, they're mostly just air. :-)

I finally got the software that I wrote to talk to a message board and display what I wanted it to display. There is still a lot to fix, and a whole lot more to actually implement, but things are on their way. I've finally got something tangible (or at least visible, since it's only a pattern of light emitted by the sign) to show for what I've been doing all these months. Well, aside from the Arabic solution -- but that's not yet finished either. Still, we did sell some message boards based on it, so that's still an achievement, I think.

I found the oggs that I ripped from my Joan Baez CD today (I can't find the CD any more). I had forgotten how much I like Joan Baez. I really like folk music. It's not as good as Christmas carols — no music really is — but folk can come close.

I would guess that it's the greek part of me. Folk music is frequently wistful and a little sad. Mournful, almost. The greeks have always been good at that: it's why they have the fates, after all.

Beth and I are getting married! We haven't set a date yet, but we're looking at some time in June or July of 2005.

Ok, that's old news at this point which I just forgot to blog. Here's the new news: I gave her a ring! It's not much, but after a year of being unemployed and only a few months of employment, I couldn't afford better. But it is pretty, at least.

It went well! Byron had good things to say about me, and I got a (small) raise. I'm really enjoying my time at Solartech.

Work for Solartech has been good — I've really been enjoying it. I've been really growing my Java skills, which is nice.

Anyhow, I'm off to visit Beth now, but life is finally turning up. I think that I'm actually becoming cash positive now.

It's been a little over a month now that I've been a software developer over at Solar Technology Inc.

I'm having a great time, and doing some interesting work. Hopefully I'll have some stuff to link soon.