You may or may not have noticed that this blog has been dead for a couple weeks. This is firstly because due to a recent price drop in Intel Quad Core CPU’s (specifically, the Q6600) I decided it was a good time to upgrade (even though I just got my first Core 2 Duo CPU this year). I also upgraded the graphics card to a Gainward 8800GTS Golden Sample.
An hour after getting the beast home, and pushing electrons through the thing, it started to die a horrible death of blue screens and random reboots. A logical conclusion (I thought at the time) was that the new CPU that got put in, was a dud. It turns out that the new brand of RAM I had been using (GeIL DDRII 667MHz Dual Channel 2×1GB CAS 3-4-4-8 passively cooled RAM) was not a very good product, and there has been a relatively high percentage of this RAM not working in particular configurations of machines! The store swapped me over to Corsair CAS 4 RAM, and now all is sweet again. It’s possibly slightly slower, but at least it works!
I also just happened by chance to discover a major security loophole with my webserver that delayed me putting it back online. I haven’t got around to fixing it for a couple weeks until now, and it only took about 10 minutes to fix, I just didn’t get around to it.
Recently a friend Nick asked me to join him as a duo in the foxy1000 mountain bike race at Fox Creek, which is a total of a 100km race, 25km per lap, and each lap involves 1000m of vertical ascending. The idea is we would do 50km each, i.e. 2000m ascending each in total. Since I’ve done stuff all riding this year, I went out to Fox Creek on Sunday to get in some training with Nick. As I was putting my bike back together (I have a small boot to fit it in) I put the front wheel on the wrong way around. I then squeezed the front brake and realised instantly the error of my way. With hydraulic disc brakes, if you squeeze the lever with no disc in, the pads get stuck closed together. I tried prying the two pads apart, to no avail. I then tried calling half a dozen bike stores for help, but being a Sunday, none seemed to be open. I also tried phoning a friend to see if they could quickly look up on the internet what to do. Getting really frustrated, and flat phone battery, I gave a screwdriver one last good hard push through the brake pads and voila!! Fixed like new. I think the problem was I wasn’t prying them open from both sides, which would have wedged the two pistons back on an angle and created too much friction due to the angle of force.
Very excitedly, I span the wheel. For some reason, I stuck my finger dangerously close to the rotor. I didn’t realise at the time just quite how sharp all the machined holes are in these disc rotors. My finger nail brushed up against the rotor, and the rotor cut into the middle of my finger nail, grabbing the tip of my finger and wedging it into the brake pad. This cut a third of the way across my finger nail, all the way through. At the time I just grabbed my finger and compressed it to numb the pain, and it didn’t seem to hurt that much. After walking around in circles a little bit trying to distract myself from the pain, I opened up my hand to find it covered in tomato sauce. For some reason I absolutely panicked, possibly because I haven’t actually seen any blood for a few years. Worried what was going to happen to my finger, I drove straight home, and then to a GP clinic where I waited almost 2 hours to get a tetanus shot. By the time I got home, I had wasted 6 hours of my Sunday – most unhappy!!
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