I had a great time participating in the Top Hat Classic bike ride yesterday in Plesanton, Ca. Shelli and I had signed up for the 25 mile ride as team HPSJ. She got a lot in donations (to fight MS), and got her daughter and sister in-law to ride with us. Rain was expected all week, but it turned out to be quite a nice day and some 500+ riders had signed up to participate.



Here's a pic of me.

My co-worker Alejandro has been cool enough to host both my webiste (twack.com), and my brothers Disc Golf website (deltawindjammers.com) for the past several years on his Windows server and cable modem. He's been having many problems with his server, and last week threw in the towel when it died for good. He said it's been fun, but he had no intention of resurrecting the machine. Many thanks for all the years of free web hosting. :o)

So now, websites on CD, I've been poking around looking for the right place to host the sites and have settled on Brinkster.com for at least the next year. I won't go into all the details, but it looks like they'll offer a great, stable place to experiment with new site designs, mroe data integration, etc.

We had a great, if busy, Easter weekend. We went to Quail Lakes church to see Ryan's mom sing in choir on Good Friday, and had great dinners at grandma's and Sarah's on Saturday and Sunday respectively. Turns out I guess Mike and Jennifer didn't infact go to Hawaii but settled on a road trip to Vegas.

And that's about it. Back to processing EDI files. :o)

Not too much to report. Mike and Jennifer went to Hawaii this week and mom's been watching Bella.

I've been cracked out playing Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion. Because of which, we just bought a new Dell laptop (mostly Eighmee bought :o) so she could have a computer to use. It's a nice 2Ghz XPS with 2 gigs of ram and wireless internet, etc.

It's been raining quite a bit, but yesterday was a nice, predicted, warm and dry day which I took off from work with the main objective of a nice long bike ride. After dropping Eighmee off at work I went to Fun Sport Bike and got some White Lightning chain lube a spare tube (just incase :o), and after having some Subway for lunch with Eighm I embarked on a 32 mile ride up to Eight Mile Road, over to West and back home. It was my first big ride with my new clipless Candy SL pedals and some other gear. A great ride.

This weekend it Easter weekend. We're going to my grandparents for dinner tomorrow and to Eighmee's niece Sarah's for dinner Sunday.

Well I've been keeping up the workouts. Only running about 6 miles a week, but cycling almost 60 miles a week. This past weekend I had the misfortune of experiencing my first skinny-tire blow-out while I was a little over 4 miles out east of UOP on the levee. It's not the best area to ride in, and there's quite a bit of glass once you get east of UOP but I hadn't ridden very far out in that direction so I though I'd give it a shot. I made it to about the West Ln. underpass which was flooded, so I turn around to head back and wham-o. I think it was a broken Yoo-hoo bottle. :o( I thought I had everything to fix it, but I'd never done it before and wasn't about to start dismantling my bike in the quasi-getto. So I start huffin' it back. My decision was shortly affirmed by three locals walking on the oppisite side of East Bianchi. One of them who was overweight and quite boisterous decided to start belting out, "Why don't you ride yo bike chicken!", over and over and over again. Not that I was in any danger but sometimes you need a little experience like that to remind you, this is why I don't ride over here very often. :o) So I walk it the 4 miles home and patching the tube was a piece of cake. So here's my guide to patching a rear tire:

Pop the quick release,

pull back the derailer and release the chain from the cassette,

slide the tire off between the brake pads,

pull the tire off the rim. The tube is anchored by the valve.

unscrew the tube valve and remove the tube.

pump in a bit of air to find the leak,

stick a quick patch sticker over the hole,

check the tire for any remaining objects,

squeeze all the air out of the tube and reassemble.