First Impressions: Santa Cruz Blur

 Competitive Cyclist/Backcountry was offering a 2024 Santa Cruz Blur C at $4300. That in itself was a good deal, but what sealed it was that they offered an upgrade to T-type transmission for $800, and I would get to keep the old non-T-type parts for converting one of my other bikes, which I've been wanting to do for quite some time.

I will commend Backcountry for their excellent customer service. The bike arrived with a broken cassette, 

and they promptly sent me a new one, and paid for a local bike shop to do the cassette swap and also tweak the derailleur.

The bike showed up, I waxed the chain, and took it up Table Mountain/Charcoal Road. While the bike is a good 4 pounds lighter than my old hardtail from 2014, I'm not sure I could tell the difference in weight. The big differences are the AXS transmission shifting system, which shifts perfectly every time and don't get stuck in a gear like my old bike, and the remote lockout. I had no idea what a remote lockout was when I bought the bike, but now that I have one I love it!

The remote lockout lets you twist your wrist which pulls a cable to turn off suspension on both front and rear at the same time. I found myself using it all the time, disabling suspension on a fire-road climb and then turning it back on for every descent. The result is I felt way less beat up on this bike than on my older hard tail.

My big complaint about the bike is the same as my complaint about most stock bikes -- the gearing is simply way too high. I would have preferred if the bike came with 30t or 32t chainrings instead of 34. As usual, bike manufacturers spec bikes for strong 25 year olds, not people who have creaky knees and much prefer spinning up mountains than mashing up them.

Regardless, I set PRs on several downhills on my first run on the bike, indicating that yes, not having rear suspension was holding me back on descending. I also executed several jumps, which meant that the bike wasn't too heavy to get air time!

I guess I don't need to return this bike!

Review: Frieren - Beyond Journey's End Vol 1-5

 Frieren - Beyond Journey's End had a premise that I found intriguing, so I checked out 5 digital volumes from the library onto my Kindle Scribe.

The graphic novel volume starts with the end of a big adventure = the Elf mage Frieren and her fellow adventurers have defeated the Demon King and brought peace to the land. They are hailed as heroes, and part ways. Frieren, being an Elf, does not age or die, but her companions are two humans and a dwarf, so she attends her funeral.

The cleric in the party tricks her into adopting his mentee as her apprentice, and she embarks on a new adventure. The story starts slow, and you get the impression the Freren seems to be an unmotivated (by human standards) sort of person. Since she lives forever, she can effectively take her time and tarry at places for years at a time in no hurry.

As the backstory emerges, however, you start to see that she's no ordinary mage, for instance, suppressing her mana aura deliberately so that she appears weaker than she is. You discover that she was the apprentice of a legendary mage.

Like all Japanese graphic novels, a lot of the story is told in pictures instead of words or dialogue, so pages can fly by without a single word. I assume that the story was serialized in one of those weekly compendium magazines, so there's no hurry on the storyline. The story arc about demonic magic took more than a volume to cover. The story arc about getting a mage certification took more than a volume and still isn't done when I put down volume 5.

The characters are slow to evolve, so you have to give the series time to read (hence at least 5 volumes before I tried writing a review). It's a good enough read that I will keep checking out more volumes from the library as they become available.

More Everything Forever

 More Everything Forever is Adam Becker's critique of the future as touted by our current batch of billionaires --- Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman. These billionaires frequently tout a future of space travel (colonizing Mars), or uploading into cyberspace (immortality) or any number of exotic fantasies rather than solving the immediate problems here on Earth now: poverty, inequality, and climate change.

The book goes into the billionaires ties to the Effective Altruism movement, which the author is clearly disdainful of, for good reason. The math that the EA movement uses to justify concentrating on AI safety instead of solving immediate problems for humans who are alive today comes in for particular scrutiny.

the fact that they’re primarily worried about existential threats in the first place is the other problem: once a threat has been deemed existential, it’s impossible to outweigh it with any less-than-existential threat in the present day. In determining which threats count as “existential,” much ends up depending on estimations of risk, estimations that—apparently—aren’t informed by the best available science and expert opinions. “MacAskill falls into the trap of being ‘foolishly wise,’” says Watson. “Wise fools [are] those who recognise the limits of their knowledge and therefore are able to take some account of what they don’t know. I think of the opposite as the foolish wise, very clever people whose erudition and wide book-learning lead them however to inadequately account for the ‘unknown unknowns.’”20 Despite these important mistakes at the core of their worldview, Ord, MacAskill, Sandberg, Bostrom, and the rest of those who work at Trajan House aren’t fringe. The building itself is testimony to how influential their views are and how successful their movement has been. It screams of money, from the corporate office furniture to the snack drawers filled with cruelty-free chocolate bars.21 Financial records show a little over $75 million in donations to Effective Ventures in their 2021 fiscal year alone, most of which came from Open Philanthropy (kindle loc 2918)

Bit by bit, the author demolishes the arguments the billionaires use to justify spending massive money on a Mars effort for instance. Even a post-nuclear apocalyptic Earth is likely to be more habitable than Mars, for instance. Unlike Earth, Mars doesn't have an atmosphere or magnetic field, so you get a direct hit of radiation on the surface --- so underground is probably the only place to live. But the soil itself on Mars is poisonous! Mars as a backup location for the human race is basically a fantasy.

  But “when the asteroid hit 66 million years ago it was a nicer day than today on Mars—otherwise no animal life would have survived,” says Peter Brannen, author of The Ends of the World, a survey of mass extinctions on Earth. “So we better learn to live here. This is it.”83 Our existence is proof Brannen is right: despite the horrors of that day, mammals survived, as did birds, fish, and many other vertebrates. No mammal could survive unprotected for more than a few minutes on Mars. “We’ll never trash this place so bad with nukes or climate change that somewhere else is a better option,” Brannen concludes.84 Or, as Martin Rees, cosmologist and Astronomer Royal, puts it: “It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. We’ve got to solve these problems here. Coping with climate change may seem daunting, but it’s a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. No place in our solar system offers an environment even as clement as the Antarctic or the top of Everest. There’s no ‘Planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.”85 If you knew, right now, that another asteroid was bearing down on Earth like the one that hit sixty-six million years ago, and if you were offered the choice of staying here or going to a base on Mars like the one Musk wants to build, staying here would be the far better bet. Everyone here would probably die, but without supply missions from Earth, everyone on Mars would definitely die. (kindle loc 4392)

Then there all the science fiction ideas that the billionaires go for, such as unlimited growth (and exponential growth if possible) for humanity, the technological singularity, and all these "end-times" type of destiny for the human race come under scrutiny. In every case, the math doesn't make sense.

 This is painfully apparent in the way Jeff Bezos talks about geniuses of the future. He dreams of one thousand Mozarts and one thousand Einsteins among his trillion humans living in space. But he’s neglecting the potential Einsteins and Mozarts that are living and dying in poverty right now. If Bezos really wants a dynamic civilization, he could invest in solving the problems that we actually face. He could tackle the enormous levels of wealth inequality in the world today. He could put all his resources into fighting global warming, which will also have unequal impacts around the world. Instead, he’s going to space—and he thinks that’s the best and most important thing he can do with his money. (kindle loc 4452)

 If growth in humanity’s energy usage were to continue at the same rate past the four-hundred-year mark, in 1,350 years we’d be using all the energy produced by the Sun; 1,100 years after that, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the Milky Way. And about 1,250 years after that, 3,700 years from right now, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the observable universe.44 If Bezos believes that ceasing to grow our energy usage must lead to a culture of stagnation, he’d better get used to the idea. Sometime in the next 3,700 years—only about 80 percent of the present age of the Great Pyramid at Giza—humanity must stop growing its energy use. And it’s probably going to happen much sooner than that (kindle loc 570)

Finally, the best argument against the technological salvation via singularity is this:

 Most of the greatest problems facing humanity right now—global warming, massive inequality, the lurking potential for nuclear war—are not driven by resource scarcity or a lack of technology. They’re social problems, requiring social solutions. Increased energy usage, increased technological prowess, or even an increase in the amount of “intelligence” brought to bear on these problems (whatever that might mean) isn’t likely to solve them. These are political problems, problems of persuasion and justice and fairness. Negotiating durable ceasefire agreements isn’t something that AI is likely to help with; sending vast numbers of humans to space won’t end violence in the Middle East; doubling humanity’s energy consumption isn’t going to fix political polarization in the United States or stem the rise of fascism worldwide. If we want a future that puts people first, we need to recognize that there are no panaceas, and likely no utopias either. Nothing is coming to save us. There’s no genie inside a computer that will grant us three wishes. Technology can’t heal the world. We have to do that ourselves. (kindle loc 5187)

Overall, I wish the book was better written. In many places its meandering, and takes a long time to get to the point. But the book is a great antidote to the techno-optimists, and reminds us that just because some smart people get fabulously wealthy doesn't mean that they aren't subject to the same wishful thinking (the author goes into "Engineer's disease") that affects all of us at one point or another.

 concentrated wealth has eroded democracy in the United States and around the world. Peter Thiel has aided that erosion with his support of Trump and other far-right politicians. The antidemocratic ambitions of tech billionaires extend through Sam Altman’s power fantasy of his own ascension to king of the world straight to the permanent galactic fascism of Marc Andreessen. While those specific visions are implausible, the fact that billionaires harbor such dreams is an indication of the risks that we as a society are taking by allowing billionaires to happen. They will keep looking for ways to extend their control over the world unless they are curtailed. Their dreams are dreams of endless capitalism of the most brutal sort, because they know that such a system would allow them to win still more money and power. This is another reason it’s difficult to imagine a future other than the ones they promote: as the saying goes, it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. But eventually—and probably sooner rather than later—the present growth-obsessed form of capitalism must come to an end. And it can end without ending the world, as Ursula K. Le Guin reminded us. “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.”81 (kindle loc 5241)

New Touring Bike Concept

Bicycle technology has evolved significantly since I built my custom touring bike in 2008. Back then, I used medium-reach caliper brakes (57mm) and a triple chainring (24x39x50) with a 9-speed 11-34 cassette. These brakes limited tire clearance to 35mm with fenders. After Avocet closed, quality tires wider than 28mm were scarce, so I rarely exceeded 25mm.

When spec'ing a custom Lynskey for my friend Arturo, we modeled it after the Rivendell Roadeo. By then, wide-range doubles with 10-speed cassettes were available. We used SRAM integrated brake levers paired with a mountain bike drivetrain (24x40 chainring and 11-34 cassette). This setup worked because SRAM road and mountain components shared the same cable pull — a compatibility Shimano still resists. Despite a rear-brake-bridge height error — which Lynskey fixed after Arturo returned the frame — the setup proved effective for touring.

By the time I acquired my Co-Motion Periscope, 10-speed 11-36 cassettes were standard. Later, when rebuilding my touring frame, I adopted a 1x drivetrain using a Shimano M5100 cassette and Microshift friction shifters to bypass Shimano's indexing incompatibilities. Removing the front derailleur proved so successful that I have omitted it from every family bike build since.

After retrofitting my touring bike to wireless AXS, I was convinced enough by the ergonomics — and the reliability under load — to start designing a frame around the new drivetrain. Note that if you don’t like having electronics on your bike, SRAM now makes a cable-operated T-type derailleur, which eliminates the need for batteries, and yes, someone has experimented with friction-shifting it!

My touring priorities are reliability, robustness, and light weight. Since my CPAP machine requires nightly power, I always have access to electricity, making electronic shifting a viable upgrade. SRAM's T-type transmissions are particularly tough; the derailleur mounts directly to the thru-axle, eliminating fragile hangers. Individual parts can be replaced if damaged. I’ve long been willing to pay in additional weight in exchange for a more robust drivetrain, and the T-type compromise is well within what I’m willing to accept (it's not clear to me that the T-type dropouts would cause the frame to be heavier than one built for a derailluer hanger).

I remain skeptical of disc brakes. They are heavy, prone to squealing, and difficult to service in the field. Many claim they work better in the rain, but with Kool-Stop Salmon brake pads, I’ve never had any trouble stopping in the rain. Others have argued that rims wear quickly in the rain and wet, but in many years of touring I have yet to wear out a single rim while touring — the reality is that if you’re touring for scenery when it rains your vision is usually too compromised by the precipitation to see much scenery anyway! The reinforcement required for disc forces also adds weight and stiffness to the frame, compromising handling. For example, Ritchey's rim-brake Road Logic frame is 230g lighter than its disc counterpart, before rotors and hydraulics. Given that I'm 140 pounds (and at my heaviest was 155 pounds), the additional stopping power of discs is wasted on me. Years of tandem touring on dual-pivot calipers have also strengthened my grip — enough to skid both wheels in an emergency stop.

My ideal touring bike would combine a T-type transmission with rim brakes. The 142mm thru-axle spacing matches QR 135mm, allowing a stronger wheel with equalized spoke tension provided the hub was not built to support disc brakes. White Industries can custom-build the rim-brake-only-designed MI5 hubs to this spec. Paired with a lighter custom frame built for Tektro 559 calipers, this would clear 42-45mm tires without the weight and stiffness penalties of disc mounts.

A matching quick-release front fork designed for the same 559 brakes would complete the chassis. Yes, it would look odd with a QR front wheel and a T-type thru-axle rear wheel, but the benefits of the stronger wheel and T-type robustness are worth it.

There is one niggle with the T-type chainline, which is designed for 55mm chainlines. However, you can adapt SRAM road-type cranks with 3rd party chainrings to get a 47.5mm chainline which will work with T-type transmissions. Alternatively, a Shimano GRX crank would also work, giving you a 46.9mm chainline, which is just short of the 47.5mm requirement the SRAM specifies for a 142mm thru-axle bike.

The result is a sport-tourer with the robustness of a T-type transmission, the precision of AXS shifting, and the simple maintenance of dual-pivot caliper brakes. This design offers massive tire clearance and field-serviceability without the fragility of traditional derailleur hangers. The hard part is finding someone willing to make it: pairing a T-type dropout with rim brakes is an unusual ask, and tradition-minded builders tend to push back against mixing standards this way. With Paragon Machine Works out of business it might even be difficult to source the frame parts necessary to make this frame. And there is no danger that any mainstream manufacturer (or even custom bike maker) would even consider making a production bike out of this design.

I’m probably not going to order or build such a bike myself for some time. I still love my custom built Strong frame, and it can clear all the tires I need it to clear for the road (35-38mm). But if I should crack my frame, decide to take a gravel-oriented tour or my sons start to get tall enough to steal my backup Roadini, I would start shopping for a custom builder, and this is the article I’ve written to guide him or her as to my thinking.

Upgrading the Touring Bike to AXS Wireless

I've been using the M5100 rear derailleur and cassette on my touring/commute road bike since the 2021 rebuild after the frame cracked and was replaced under warranty. The 1x philosophy has proved correct: the gear range is wide (I only ran out of high gears trying to hang with a fast pack), there's only one shifter to keep track of, and you never drop the chain because the front derailleur was shifted at the wrong time. The M5100's gear jumps are big enough to handle the rapidly changing Bay Area grades, which also force a fresh shift quickly enough that being between gears never lasts long.

My wife's Lynskey GR300 from two years ago, however, was instructive. The disc brakes still squealed annoyingly, but the shifting was amazing — quiet, and so smooth that when Arturo tried her bike he thought a shift hadn't happened until he noticed the pedaling getting easier or harder. By contrast, my M5100, while reliable, would occasionally flub shifts under load. When we built her Ritchey Montebello, I went 1x Eagle AXS again, and that bike performed admirably too: it never missed a shift, and the battery life has been superb.

My White Industries rear hub could be retrofitted with an XDR driver, letting it accept an Eagle cassette. All I'd need was a wireless rear derailleur and dual-control shifters/brake levers. However, SRAM had stopped making those levers, and eBay prices were well into the $700 range — too rich for my blood.

In 2024, SRAM upgraded the wireless Blips to pair directly with their derailleurs, without needing another SRAM device to handle the initial pairing. At $105 a pair, the Blips could be mounted anywhere on the bike. The batteries aren't user-replaceable, but SRAM claims 4-7 years of actual use, and they're light enough to carry a spare pair on tour. My other touring friends had steadily converted to AXS — its wide range and easy pack-up made it attractive for anyone flying with their bike.

In April, I spotted a deal on backcountry.com: a Santa Cruz Blur with GX AXS for under $5K. It got better when a customer rep told me that for $800 I could upgrade the bike to T-type transmission AND keep the original parts — enough to convert my touring bike to AXS. On a mountain bike, T-type has real value: there's no fragile hanger to bend, and those bikes are meant to get trashed. I sprung for the upgrade. After enough riding to confirm I wanted to keep the Santa Cruz, I bought the White Industries XDR driver and a pair of wireless Blips. I already had a waxed Eagle NX chain ready to go.

Rather than do the install myself, I took it to my local shop, The Bicycle Outfitter. I described what I wanted: Shimano driver replaced with XDR, old chain removed, Blips installed under the hoods where the Ergopower thumb-shifter lever would have been on my 2008-era Campagnolo Record brake levers. "But that'll be too fat!" said the shop employee. "Try it!" I said. We took the Blips out of the retail packaging, pulled the hoods back, and slotted them into indents in the plastic body of the brake lever, almost as though molded for them. After we pulled the hood back down over the Blip, it looked right. "OK, but if it falls off or you don't like it, it's on you!" "No problem. Just look at it, it looks as though it was designed for it!"

A couple of days later, I swung by to pick it up. "That hood placement worked out really well!" declared the same shop employee. "It makes the whole setup feel like integrated brake lever shifting. In fact, I'm going to steal the placement idea for an AXS conversion on my own bike. I just ordered the Blips for myself!"

I rode it on my commute for a couple of days and then took it up Montebello Road. As expected, the bike shifted well, and the hood placement let me shift standing, on the drops, or rolling along on the hoods. Moving my hands on a climb from the top of the bars to the hoods to trigger a shift was no worse than bar-end shifters — actually a bit better. I triggered a false-positive shift exactly once. I also programmed the "push both Blips at once" function to push the lap button. (It can also be programmed to show the map screen on the Garmin Edge 840.) The biggest difference would come off road in rapidly changing terrain, where flubbing a shift might mean having to get off and walk. While the Garmin had a gear indicator, I never used it, relying on the bike computer's beep whenever I hit either end of the cassette.

In retrospect, I should have made this conversion much earlier. The shifting is smooth, and the added 10t sprocket would have let me stay in the draft of the fast touring group last year. I wouldn't call it a "game changer" — the engine didn't change — but it's a nice quality-of-life improvement. I can see myself swapping to a smaller chainring eventually to get a lower low gear while still keeping a higher high than the M5100 offered. (As it stands, all I've gained is a higher high — enough that I wouldn't spin out even at 32mph, which is probably much too high!)

(Bike shop employee's converted blip-enabled AXS bike. Note that you can't even see where the shifters are at this angle) Note that this type of conversion can only be done using SRAM AXS components. Shimano does not have any equivalent to the wireless blips.

Recommended.

 

Review: Same as Ever

 Same as Ever proports to give you an overview of timeless observations about humanity. It makes the point that you can't really predict the future, but the motivations that drive human beings aren't ever going to change and is a better reliable guide to investing or thinking about the future than focusing on news stories.

To me, it reads like a collection of platitudes, not backed up by studies or science, frequently referencing other sources for authoritativeness, and is even short on advice on how to apply his observations. Once in a while you get an interesting insight:

Psychologist Amos Tversky once said that “the secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.” A successful person purposely leaving gaps of free time on their schedule to do nothing in particular can feel inefficient. And it is, so not many people do it. (kindle loc 1772)

 (Even then, that insight can frequently be found in other books, so it's usually not a particularly unique one to Housel)

This book is the equivalent of junk food for intellectuals. It's written well, and is easy to read, but I bet at the end of the book you'll be hard pressed to think of some unique nugget of wisdom that he imparted to you. The best thing I can say about this book was that it was short and didn't waste too much of my time.

Mallorca Recommendations

 This was my second trip to Mallorca, and I stand by my assessment from the first trip: first, it's really hard to justify a trip to Spain if you're a Californian, since the best weather in Spain coincides with the best weather in the Bay Area as well. Having said that, apparently we got lucky because while it was sunny in Mallorca it was raining in the Bay Area, and it only rained our last day in Mallorca and it cleared up in the Bay Area by the time we got home.

Staying in Pollenca was the right move. We took advantage of both shuttles to get to places we couldn't easily get to and got to do our one way rides, and I had alternate routes that I thought would have been worth doing from Andratx as well. Of course, the return to the hotel was something we did multiple times and the repeats there couldn't be helped.

Xiaoqin thought we could have done well to split time between Pollenca and Soller. That would have given us a chance to ride Puig Major. Maybe 5 nights in Pollenca and 5 nights in Soller would have been ideal, since that would not give you a chance to get bored. The logistics would have been challenging, though: in addition to transporting bikes you'd also have to transport the bike boxes as well, and you might end up giving up some discounts you get from staying in one location for more days.

To my surprise, Trek Travel, which I always considered expensive, is actually very price competitive if you're traveling by yourself. They charge $2000 per person, and include a bike rental as part of the price. Of course, their accommodations is inland and wasn't right on the coast with easy access to Alcudia and the Assos Outlet store, but in exchange you get van support during the day. Of course, for a family you can't beat the way we did it. The single person charge for one person with Trek travel paid for us to have lodging for 8 nights, and still have had money to pay for a guide for the kids the one day we wanted to do the long ride and couldn't bring them with us!

The last time I visited the island someone told me that it was a mistake to bring our own bikes instead of renting. I think that's because he wasn't accounting for a family of 4. The cost savings of bringing our own bikes was over $1000!

The riding in Mallorca is excellent, and different enough from the Bay Area to justify a trip. None of the grades were steep, the drivers were much more polite than California drivers, and riding on the island is like being on a big event ride (century or fondo) every day, day after day. Big groups of cyclists of every type (men, women, fast, slow, old, young) would pass you every minute no matter which direction you were riding. It's just something that you need to experience once in your life, to be in a place that's so oriented towards cycling that bicycles are far more common than cars.

To be honest, even if you're not into cycling, I think it's worth a visit to Mallorca. First, there's plenty to do for non cyclists. Secondly, if you have a decent sized family, hiring a guide to cycle you around might give you an idea of what the sport is about and you might discover that you enjoy it when you're not having to cope with American drivers and bad traffic and are surrounded by many other cyclists to inspire you and maybe even challenge you.

Boen was phenomenal on this year's trip. He tackled every climb with aplomb and learned to use his gears. Watching the "chase cam" videos of him shot by Xiaoqin was a little disconcerting. He handled his bike well, but all the time I found myself aware that if he'd made a bad decision there was little my wife and I could have done about it.

I enjoyed the trip. While I wouldn't repeat it every year, I think that whenever I find myself bored by riding the same local roads for the ten millionth time I will find myself thinking of Mallorca and Girona.

Review: AirFly Bluetooth Adapter

 In my wisdom, I bought 3 noise cancelling over the ear headsets for a family of 4. Rather than get a 4^th, I thought that the bulkiness could be eliminated if I could use my noise-cancelling capable Pixel Buds Pro on flights where I needed noise cancelling. Some airlines have Bluetooth capability on the seatback screens, but many airlines do not.

AirFly is designed to plug into a standard headphone jack and then broadcast the sound over Bluetooth that’s paired with a pair of headphones. I’d used such adapters in the past, but they always required a power adapter as well, whereas these provide themselves with 17 hours of power after you charge them up with a USB C charger, which would last even the longest flight.

In use, these work very well, and I watched 2 movies on recent fights with them with no issues. In fact, I ran out of movies I was interested in watching before the batteries on my ear buds gave up or the Airfly gave up.

You have to be realistic. When one of my sons stopped using the Sony XM2000 I switched to those and those are still much better. But for the price and lack of bulk these are great.

Review: Ritchey Classic Zeta Wheels

 I got the Ritchey Logic Classic Zeta Wheels for around $300 from a mailing list used. At that time, I was just wanting new wheels for Bowen's Roadini that weren't as heavy, and these seemed to fit the bill. I was unprepared for how amazingly well thought out and designed they are for travel.

Without tools, you can remove the freehub body, axle, and driver. These not only come off to make the wheels flat for packing, you can also stuff them back into the dropouts to provide the much needed stiffening for the rear triangle of the bike when packed into a hard case box. This saves the need for a separate stiffener to lose, and stiffens the drive train. As a result of all these optimizations, Bowen's bike packs very nicely into a Performance hardcase (or Trico Ironcase). Much better than all the other more expensive fancy bikes!

I only wish they came in XDR, but if you find a pair of these for sale (used or new), grab them as long as you're still using Shimano HG drivetrains!

Review: The Art of Spending Money

 The Art of Spending Money is a really verbose book that takes a long time to tell you what it wants to say. Normally, I'd be very annoyed at something like this, but I read it on a transatlantic flight and found that the style it was written in was so conversational and easy to read that I didn't mind.

The book makes a few points:

1. You should avoid spending money to try to buy social status. That's because it's counter-productive --- first of all, people you like don't care how rich you are. Secondly, any status you can buy is by definition temporary.

2. Don't think of saving money as sacrificing something you want. Think of it as buying independence. By keeping your lifestyle costs low, you're effectively buying independence from the capriciousness of your boss, the economy, and even your future.

3. Utility is worth paying for. But you need to understand what utility you want. He describes author David Trips taking a trip to Africa where they stayed at a mix of high end hotels and lower end camps.

After the trip Brooks and his family realized they enjoyed the lower-end homely camps more than the nice hotels. At the cheap camps they got to socialize with locals and meet other guests. His kids played soccer with the staff. At the expensive hotels they were isolated in cocoons of sterile safety. That was the entire allure of the nice hotels—“stay here and you will hardly notice any difference between Midtown Manhattan and the Serengeti.” But it wasn’t at all what his family actually wanted. The pursuit of luxury and perhaps status detracted from the utility of the trip. (kindle loc 1193)

4. When you buy experiences, it's not a matter of buying expensive travel or exotic locations. It's really about building memories.

 People love to gawk at the power of compounding when investing their money. It’s much harder to think about the value of compounding memories you get by trading money for time, but the results can be just as incredible. (kindle loc 1379)

5. Try spending more as an experiment. If the extra expenditure brings you joy, then you know you've uncovered a taste and it's worth future spending at that level. If not, then you'll know you aren't missing anything by paying more in the future. (I will note that this can quickly lead to a hedonistic treadmill that makes your lifestyle super expensive --- one item he mentions is private jet travel!)

6. If you make a big deal of having money and succeed in being rich, you will spoil your kids. The unspoiled rich kids he encounters are the ones where the parents (for whatever reason) don't treat people as if the money they have matter.

Warren Buffett once said that he often hears rich people talk about how dangerous a welfare society is, creating a generation of moochers reliant on food stamps and unemployment benefits. But “these same people are leaving their kids a lifetime supply of food stamps and beyond,” he said. “Instead of having a welfare officer, they have a trust fund officer. And instead of having food stamps, they have stocks and bonds that pay dividends.” (kindle loc 2125)

Ok, I've summarized the book for you. Yes, that's all the content that was in the book! 

Review: COROS HRM

 The watch band that could take my Fenix 7 Pro and mount it on my upper arm broke. No substitutes could be found. I broke out the older Polar OH1+, but the battery died after only 6 hours. The COROS HRM came highly recommended, and I was quite impressed.

First, the battery life is amazing. Even after a week of riding it would still be around 20% of battery left. I use it a lot more than the Polar or the Schosche because it never sits on the charger. I can just leave it in my helmet and then I won't forget to wear it! The device has been very accurate, and matches my subjective experience much more than the other HRMs I've tried. It doesn't have the weird dropouts the Schosche had.

I'm keeping the device. Recommended!

April 12-13: Epilogue

 

We had breakfast in the morning at 7:30am, with everyone gathered around. Outside it was cloudy but not raining, though the wind was definitely blowing. Arturo and Mark were going to the airport at 10:30, Joe was going to Palma to pick up his wife, rent a car, and explore Mallorca for a couple more days before flying to Seville, and Stephan, Rosie, Otto, and Benjamin were headed home directly to Munich.

Our own flight wasn’t until 8:00pm, so we had all day. After breakfast, we packed Boen’s bike, which was in a cardboard box. We removed the front wheel, jammed in the fork stiffener, removed the rear derailleur and duct taped it to the frame. We then removed the handlebar from the faceplated stem, and then dropped the entire bike like that into the box, and then piled in all the padding we had brought with us from the US. I extracted all the duct tape I needed, then dropped the remainder of the roll into the box. We then taped up the box and put wheels at the bottom and rolled it back into the bike storage area.

That gave us plenty of time to get back to the hotel room, wash our hands, and pack and then check out of the hotel. We were all done by 10:00am, just in time to see Arturo and Mark off—their taxi had arrived early!

We took the bus to Alcudia, and this time found the city wall where we could walk on it—like a mini Girona! It was windy and we started feeling raindrops, but that did not stop the continuous stream of cyclists on the main road which we spotted as the bus drove us to Alcudia. I reflected later that given the large number of cyclists from England the rain might just be a familiar thing for them to ride through!

We ate lunch at a relatively new restaurant (one that had just opened 2 weeks earlier), which had good sandwiches and empanadas, and on the way back to the bus stop spotted a Japanese restaurant ran by Chinese people. It wasn’t very good though!

Back at the hotel, we said goodbye to Stephan and family. Arturo had texted us that the left luggage at the Palma airport was under construction so there was absolutely no point getting to the airport earlier—we wouldn’t be able to explore Palma unless we were willing to lug our bike boxes around!

Our bus arrived promptly at 5:00pm, and we loaded up the boxes in the rain. The drive to the airport went without a hitch, though we did get a text notification that our plane was 15 minutes delayed. At the airport, we easily got carts that could handle the bike boxes and wheeled them to the SAS counter. We were informed that our bikes would be checked all the way to San Francisco (awesome!) and we wouldn’t have to retrieve them for our overnight layover in Copenhagen.

Unlike in San Francisco, however, where the staff just took our bike boxes, we had to manually cart them over to the oversized luggage area, where we gave them over and then we could clear security and have dinner.

The flight went without a hitch and once in Copenhagen I was impressed by how we could get to the Comfort Hotel at the airport without stepping outside (a big feature because it was 11:00pm by the time we landed!)

The next morning, we woke up to a fantastic breakfast. The place was so good that it was quite clear that a business meeting was happening next to us. After that, we had time to visit downtown Copenhagen and visit the famous street where Hans Christian Anderson lived. What was annoying was that there was an app to automatically pay for public transit on my phone, but the settings on the app was not sticky, so even though I’d paid for Xiaoqin on the way downtown, on the way back to the airport that setting got unset so when the ticket inspector came he gave us a ticket.

Back at the Comfort Hotel I had time to file an electronic appeal, and then we checked out of the airport and went through the airport to find our gate. We had to clear the passport control. The Euro-wide EES was fully implemented as of April 10^th, but to my surprise at 10:30am there was no one at the passport control for our gates. The lines piled up but eventually people showed up and we gave our facial recognition biometrics at which point the passport officer told us they would no longer stamp our passport.

Unlike every other international airport, Copenhagen’s waiting area for international flights did not have duty free shops! So we could not even buy any treats for folks back home. The flight back home was relatively easy, with only a slight scare when an airline representative came to the baggage claim area to tell us that all our bikes were lost. There were quite a number of Europeans who’d travelled to the USA just for the Sea Otter Classic so this was a big disappointment but to our surprise the oversized conveyer belt fired up and all the boxes started showing up including our bikes!

Boen’s bike was in horrid shape with TSA obviously having opened the box and not bothered to try to tape it shut, but when we got home we discovered everything was undamaged and even the leftover roll of duct tape had made it back!

Steve Wang gave us a ride home and we were all done!

 

April 11: Cap Formentor and Cami de Boquer

We woke up at 6:30, ate some granola, and then rode out with lights on as it was still dark at 7:00am. The ride through town was beautiful in the early morning with no traffic and surprisingly few cyclists. By the time we got to the first pass, we had two groups of cyclists pass us. They were faster than Xiaoqin on the climb, but on the descent I caught and passed most of them—they were clearly English cyclists who were not used to the kinds of speeds you can regularly approach in the Bay Area or Mallorca.

Riding up past the tunnel, a pair of male goats started fighting each other in the middle of the road in front of me. I stopped to take a quick picture and then Xiaoqin caught up and we kept riding with vim up to the lighthouse. It was so nice at the light house with no cars, and just a few cyclists. We took selfies and admired the scenery and then descended.

At this point, I wanted to get back to the hotel to ensure the kids could eat—they had been denied entry to the dining room when not accompanied by an adult at one point during the stay. So I put in a burst of effort and set PRs all the way back to the hotel. I worked hard enough Garmin to re-assess my FTP at 187W, which was a downgrade but perhaps understandable given that I was coming down with a cold and of course was fatigue with a week of fairly hard riding.

The others had already started their ride by the time I got to the hotel, where I parked my bike and started gathering food at the breakfast room. Xiaoqin showed up after a bit and we ate a leisurely breakfast before going back to the room and changing. We packed some water into our backpacks, and then took the bus towards Port Pollenca downtown, where a 10 minute walk took us to the trail head for Cami de Boquer.

The trail took us up high and granted us views of the seaside town before weaving amongst the hills. The terrain was a lot like a desert, wind up and around the hills, but when you saw the mediterranean it was glorious, with cliffs falling straight down to the sea. Even though the forecast was for rain later that day, it was sunny and warm. The thing about hiking in Europe is that you can’t expect a wilderness experience except in a few select places, and Mallorca was not one of those select places. There were lots of people no matter where we went, and on the beach even though there were buoys marking off the swim areas it was quite clear that the water was not yet warm enough for anyone to want to jump in and swim.

We hiked back to the bus stop, and once there, rather than getting of at the hotel, we took the bus all the way to old town in Alcudia, and explored the old town, stopping at a tapa place for Bowen and Xiaoqin to sample their Tapa platter, buying ice cream and eating it before taking the bus back to Club del Sol.

We got back to the hotel early enough to start packing bikes. We started with Bowen, this time with myself being smart enough to not remove the stem but instead remove the removable front plate of the face plate of the stem. As I took  his seatpost off his bike I noted that he had an inch or so left before the minimum insertion line. We had raised both kids’ seats during this trip. We packed his bike, and then started work on mine, which was straightforward and easy --- not having paint on the titanium bike meant that I didn’t even bother wrapping the frame with pipe insulation, trusting the hard metal to resist any scratches from the softer aluminum and steel parts stored in the same box.

After that, we did Xiaoqin’s bike, which also took in the chain oil and liquid wax, as well as any tools not needed to pack Boen’s bike, which we would save for the next day. When we were done we had all the bike boxes back in the luggage storage and the balcony was free of bikes except for Boen’s.

It was Mark’s birthday, and we scrambled around trying to find a birthday present for him in vain, until Arturo had the smart idea that he could sweet talk a waitress into finding a candle and presenting him with a cake.

So it was that at dinner we sang Happy Birthday to Mark, along with the rest of the dining room as a cake got served! I gave Arturo the wine that was in our room that was untouched. It was going to rain the next day so we had no regrets about having the bikes packed so early that there was no chance to ride the next day.

Review: Fundamentals - Ten Keys to Reality

 Fundamentals is written by a Physics Nobel prize winner (Frank Wilczek), and is an elegantly written paean to science as well as philosophy, which I thoroughly enjoyed. For one thing, he starts with principles about what science is, and how as a way of knowing it’s completely different all the other ways of knowing (religion and laws being two examples he raises). I enjoyed his compartmentalized approach—laws can only make sense if we assume that humans have free will, but obviously free will isn’t compatible with what we know about physics, but they are different realms of exploration and study and we should keep them separate! I appreciate the pragmatism.

Free will is an essential concept in law and morality, while physics has been successful without it. Removing free will from law, or injecting it into physics, would make a mess of those subjects. It is totally unnecessary! Free will and physical determinism are complementary aspects of reality. (kindle loc 2693)

As far as science is concerned, his description of the fundamental particles and forces in a small table is succinct and makes it clear how compressed the laws of physics are. (Don’t worry, he goes into detail about what physicists consider “laws.”)

There’s a reasonable amount of speculation throughout the book, including the observation that electronics (computers and the like) have switching frequencies more than a billion times faster than neurochemical signals, so it only makes sense that when they get to a certain level of sophistication there would be no way for a human to keep up. Presciently, he notes that it probably wouldn’t take more than a century or two to get AI to the point where no humans can keep up other than providing direction.

The more I read the book the more I enjoyed the philosophy. For instance, he discusses living forever as being awesome, and that dying is a waste of all the learning and experience built up over a lifetime. I thoroughly agree!

Scientific understanding bears such abundant and delightful fruit that eating from its Tree of Knowledge can spoil one’s taste for other foods. Nonscientific literature can come to seem stale; nonscientific philosophy silly; nonscientific art pointless; nonscientific traditions hollow—and, of course, nonscientific religion nonsensical. (kindle loc 2753)

 

April 10th: Lluc to Sa Calobra via Bike Shuttle

We ate breakfast early and started riding towards the pickup location at around 7:30, with pick up time at 7:45. We rolled into Port Blue exactly as the shuttle bus was rolling in. Stephan and Otto were getting into their “private shuttle” as we rolled out of Club Del Sol. He would later tell us that the “private shuttle” was actually a rescue van that was delivering repaired bikes all over the island. Nobody had told the driver that he was to carry a tandem, and the driver had to do some work to fit that long bike into the trailer.

Unlike the Andratx transfer where Port Blue was the last stop, Port Blue was actually the first stop and the shuttle pulled into Port Pollenca where there were more bikes waiting for pickup. I used the rest room and got a nice picture of the shuttle.

The shuttle ride was relatively short—it being early there wasn’t a lot of traffic to slow down the van with its trailer. We were dropped off at the Respol gas station where Otto and Stephan were already cooling their heels (they’d grabbed some food and popped back into the shuttle) waiting for us.

With that, we started riding towards Sa Calobra. Arturo would later explain to us that the name meant “The Snake” in Spanish, an apt metaphor for the twisty curves the road would take all the way down to the Mediterranean from 2400’ up.  The approach was not flat, but a series of easy rollers along baby-bottom smooth roads that characterize that part of the island.

At the high point, I kept going, only to receive a text message from Xiaoqin later saying that the kids had reached the high point and refused to keep going. Arturo said later, “It was clearly pre-planned. Boen even looked a bit disappointed.” I assumed the kids would ride home from there, since they knew the route, but they had misunderstood and would wait there the entire time. I was willing to let them do this—one of the reasons Boen brought the single was so that he had a modicum of independence, and if you don’t give your kids any rewards for independence then they would just learn to dependent the whole time.

We made it to the Sa Calobra intersection, waited for everyone to gather, and then I gave instructions: if you’re going to take pictures do it on the way down, because on the way up you might not feel like doing so. There’s a climb to the saddle, and there’s a café at the bottom so we’ll regroup there so those who want to ride the entire descent in a flow state won’t feel obliged to stop for regroups. Watch out for traffic because there are places where the road turns into a one lane road and the cars will go in both directions.

We then started the 200m climb to the summit. Once at the top, it was so warm that I decided to just start riding down without waiting for the others. I might have stopped a few times to take pictures, but by and large I just took advantage of the relative quiet to enjoy the flowy descent. At 7%, it was just gentle enough to enjoy the views while still gathering serious speed between corners.

At the bottom, I parked my bike unlocked, walked into the self-service café, bought a cup of coffee and some cake, and waited for the others. They arrived just as I’d taken the first sip. I waved the folks over and we all had a snack at the coffee shop to fuel up for the climb.

Before starting the climb, I mentioned the beach to the group, so we made the customary journey to the tunnel, passed through both tunnels, and reached the beach. It was already bustling with sunbathers, swimmers—most wearing wetsuits—and tourists.

We took photos and walked back, except for Joe, who’d realized that with his speedplays he was better off riding to the tunnel. Once we were back, I told everyone to do the climb at their individual pace, and that the regroup was at the intersection where there was a café. However, if you got there early and got bored, you could turn right onto the main road and ride 200’ up to the tunnel. Past the tunnel, you’d get a nice view of the lake/reservoir.

With that, we were off. Today was the day my training program called for a high intensity of effort, going for 180+ watts for the climb. This proved to be challenging—while 180W seems easy at the beginning, after a few minutes my heart rate started to rise, and it would keep going until it hit pretty high intensity. I tried sustaining this, but after 20 minutes I fatigued and had to back off a bit before resume that intensity. It turns out that learning to hold this power for longer is one of the differences between a structured training program and “riding any old how” the way I’d always done.

At the top, I paused and sat down for a bit. Mark caught up and we rode together to the tunnel and visited the lake. Mark was feeling frisky and rode all the way to the end of the lake and back while I turned around and went back down, parked my bike. Arturo and Joe showed up, as did Mark, and we grabbed a table in the shade. Joe was in a hurry to get back to the hotel, so he left pretty quick, but I bought a couple of cans of coke for Arturo and Mike and a glass of fresh squeeze orange juice for Xiaoqin.

When Xiaoqin came back we started riding back, because Joe texted us that our kids had been waiting for us the entire time and were hungry. Unfortunately, I’d bonked and wasn’t making good speed, though by the time I got to the kids they were already reassured by Joe that I was coming, so they weren’t antsy, though complained a bit about how long we took. “I thought you were going to go straight back to the hotel!” “Mom told us to wait!” “Really?” “Um.. maybe…”

I rode the kids to the Respol garage, where we parked our bikes, and bought a bunch of food to eat. I immediately started feeling better, and by the time Xiaoqin showed up and ate her fill we were raring to go again. The ride back down Col de Feminia was easy, despite the headwind, and when we got to Pollenca I turned on the GPS and routed ourselves back to the hotel along another of Mallorca’s narrow, beautiful backroads, dumping us within a block of the hotel at the main road.

Over dinner, we debated what to do. Everyone was so tired that Puig Major was out of the question. Mark had a proposal, which was to do parts of the roads he’d missed on the first day of riding. That didn’t appeal to me, so I decided that we would do Cap Formentor again, but early in the morning so we wouldn’t get any traffic. The kids didn’t want to ride at all, so we’d get back, eat breakfast, and then take them for a hike.

The others debated options back and forth. Stephan wanted to take both kids on the tandem (Benjamin would fit on a WeeRide, but the constraint then became to get him back to the hotel before he fell asleep). The rest eventually decided on doing the reverse of the short loop we had done 2 days before.