Oh Boy. So it started this morning with me making some plans to do things on the bike, starting with a visit to the Hollywood Farmer’s market to get some supplies (especially some more superstring beans, which are delicious!) and meet a friend. Idea would be then to -after excellent tamales for lunch from my favourite stand, of course- visit a couple other places, such as a bike store in West Hollywood to get some equipment for my friend’s bike, and then maybe over to the Sunset Junction street fair (you might remember my blogging about it last year), to par-tay. Then I’d go home and work.
Bad thing number 1:
- Halfway to the middle of Hollywood on the way to the market: Catastrophic puncture. Flat tyre. Guess what? Puncture repair kit I carry around with me all the time is of course in my other bag, not the one I use for market. Sigh. So after wheeling the bike all the way to the market (I could have folded it up and taken it onto a bus or train, but I was halfway there and already late and did not want to wait for either), fun, shopping, and tamales were had, which was good. Could not do the other bike things, so I then wheeled bike to the subway, folded it and took it on a train to my ‘hood, then wheeled it home at other end, which all took a while. Actually, wheeling with shopping in its bag is a great way to get the shopping home and see what’s going on in the ‘hood, which I like to do from time to time, so not so bad.
As this is only the second problem I’ve had with this bike in almost 18 months of cycling it around the city, I decided (yeah, I know!) to take a commemorative picture of the sad scene:
But by then I’d lost a lot of time and I’m supposed to be working on writing a paper today. So I decided to pass on the Sunset junction activities (I can hear them from my place a bit, and I encouraged some of my students to go, so I can sort of live vicariously -even though I know they won’t go) and work on the paper. I want to give a draft to some of those students for them to get up to speed on the idea, and once the week starts, I don’t expect to get much time to work on this sort of thing before next weekend.
So okay, no par-tay-ing this afternoon. But first I’d better get bike back to functionality for work tomorrow.
Bad thing number 2:
- Fixing a puncture is a piece of cake if you have the kit, and some tire levers to half take off the tire, and so forth. The puncture here is weird though. There’s no tell-tale hole with barb sticking out, etc. Instead, there are several slashes in the sidewall of the outer tyre, and one of them has a corresponding slash in the inner tube under it. Not seen this before. Maybe I went over some sort of sharp-edged manhole cover? Anyway, I fixed the hole, and re-inflated the tire. (Gave the bike a bit of a polish while I was at it…. It probably wants to look good for the new semester, after all, even if a week late…. Needed cleaning a bit since there was a lot of rain in Aspen that it went through, and I also took it off-road there a number of times.)
After the bike was all back together looking excellent, what did I find? Flat back wheel. Seems that there are some sort of slow puncture… maybe more of thsoe slashes made damage to the innner tube. Sigh. I’ll have to do this all over again, starting with taking off the tyre… If it is a whole family of micro-punctures from the slashes, I’m doomed.
Worry about it later. Time to sit at the computer.
Bad thing number 3:
- I sat down at the computer. It seemed to be frozen. Wouldn’t come back from screensaver. This has never happened before (it is a mac, you see, such happenings are routine on pcs which is why I don’t use them any more). I had to turn it off abruptly – a potentially bad thing to do, but it was not responding to anything. Now it is taking forever to come back. Reboots, then slowly gives me some function back after login, but takes forever, and every application hangs. Reboot again wiht disc check. Reboot and switch off recently enabled speech recogition functions (this must be the source of the problem)… reboot.
While all this rebooting and waiting is going on, I’ve decided to whine about it here, on the little imac in the corner. None of the paper is on the drive of this computer, and so I can’t work on the paper. It is now 8:00pm, and I’ve lost so much of the day…. Maybe I should have just gone to the street fair.
-cvj
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Hi John. Like you, I share a liking of the old-fashioned methods. Also, I’d rather have a go at fixing something rather than throwing it away and replacing it, which upsets me. Weird to some, I know.
I used precisely the methods you use it seems. (Except that I use soapy water, which is good when you don’t take the inner tube off the bike. You just spread a film of it on the tube, inflate, and the punctures blow soap bubbles….) Found three more micro punctures that way. I supect a pile of glass, perhaps, but the slash on the sidewall is still odd to me……
-cvj
As a long-time cyclist, I was intrigued by the particulars of your puncture. I haven’t seen anything like that either. But I can advise something that you may have thought of yourself, though you didn’t mention it. If you’re out on the road and have a puncture again, you can patch the hole that you’ve found, wait for it to dry, inflate the tube, and listen very carefully for air hissing from another spot on the tube. If water is handy, or you’re at home, after inflating the tube you can immerse it and look for bubbles.
Most of the really serious cyclists I know don’t bother with patch kits; they just carry an extra tube on the bike and keep more at home. But I’ve never picked up this habit.
a cornelian:- Thanks!
Hi Elliot. Thanks. It seems that my hypothesis was correct. I had previously been experimenting with the speech recognition software, and I think somehow the monitor for this this places too much strain on the system. Once I disabled that “feature” again, it went back to being merely a moderately stressed (from me running way too many applications all at the same time as a matter of course) powerbook (and valiant and loveable with it).
Cheers,
-cvj
clifford,
having the same mac issue 🙁 I am thinking it may be a flaky video card. you can check the syslog for clues.
*hug*