I decided to take my bike on a  short spin yes­ter­day and to sum it up, it was just a hor­ri­ble expe­ri­ence. The first thing that fac­tored in to my dis­ap­point­ing ride was the fact that it was windy out­side. Now wind in gen­eral is annoy­ing, it makes the skin dry, tends to set the state of Cal­i­for­nia on fire, but most impor­tantly it makes cycling ten times harder than it has to be.  I mainly ride my bike to escape the has­sles of daily life, enjoy nature, and to expe­ri­ence some sup­ple­men­tary fit­ness ben­e­fits. Because of these prin­ci­ples, I try to not to ride on windy days, as it takes the enjoy­ment out of rid­ing. How­ever, because it is Christ­mas break, and I’m using this period as a kind of “train­ing camp” I decided to ride anyways.

I opened up my garage door, and imme­di­ately real­ized that cycling was a bad idea. It was cold, and the gusts were so strong that I was sure they would either throw me off bal­ance while rid­ing, or they would make ped­al­ing sig­nif­i­cantly harder if I was hit head on. Regard­less, I put on my cleats, fas­tened my hel­met, and rolled down my dri­ve­way deter­mined to have a decent ride. A few pedal strokes into my ride, and before I was even out of my neigh­bor­hood and some­thing was wrong. As I ped­aled I heard a click­ing noise com­ing from the back of my bike, mean­ing that some­thing was up with my rear de-railer. I shifted a few times, and the sound went away, only to re-appear a few min­utes later. It really isn’t a good idea to ride a bike when the drive-terrain is in a ques­tion­able con­di­tion. If some­thing goes wrong the chain, or another com­po­nent could break caus­ing major dam­age to the wheels, gears, cogs, ped­als, and god knows what else. But since the click­ing didn’t appear to harm my per­for­mance, I was after all cruis­ing at a solid 23 MPH, I fig­ured it was just my bike being noisy due to the harsh cross winds and I con­tin­ued onward.

About two miles away from my neigh­bor­hood I heard some­thing bounce off my rear tire. Now it’s never good to hear some­thing bounce off the tires while rid­ing, but it’s actu­ally fairly com­mon, and I thought noth­ing of it. Thirty sec­onds later, my ride began get­ting bumpy. I stopped to check my rear wheel and found that I was blessed with my fourth flat tire. I made my way over to a nearby side walk, and inspected the dam­age. Unlike all of my other flats, in which nails decided to fling them­selves into my tire, I had no vis­i­ble signs of a punc­ture.  Decid­ing to save my pre­cious CO2 car­tridges, I called up my Mom who was a mile away from where I got my flat. Within a cou­ple of min­utes we had the bike in the back of her car, and I was on my way home to make repairs.

There’s noth­ing more frus­trat­ing than get­ting a flat on the begin­ning of a ride. Sure get­ting a flat sucks at any time, but get­ting a flat in the mid­dle of a ride at least makes things inter­est­ing and gives the vic­tim a story to tell. While get­ting one at the end of a ride isn’t as big of a deal because the vic­tim was at least able to enjoy a hearty ride before­hand. How­ever, get­ting a flat at the start of a ride gives nei­ther of these advan­tages. The vic­tim has to deal with the embar­rass­ment of hav­ing a flat, often times it’s so close to home that peo­ple even rec­og­nize them, and the vic­tim also misses out on a nice ride. I sup­pose it’s a lot like tak­ing a test, and on the first scant­ron bub­ble your pen­cil breaks. Your focus is ruined, you have to get up and dis­turb the class by hav­ing to re-sharpen your pen­cil, and by the time you get back, you real­ize that everyone’s fif­teen ques­tions ahead of you. The expe­ri­ence is just frustrating.

But beyond frus­tra­tion was anger. I was angry at the city of Tustin for hav­ing so much debris on its roads. This is the third time that I have got­ten a flat due to debris hit­ting my tire, and it’s sim­ply inex­cus­able that the road con­di­tions are like this for cyclists. When I rode all the way down to San Clemente I didn’t ride over a sin­gle patch of road that was haz­ardous to my bike. Yet, a few miles from my house and it’s nail and glass cen­tral on the streets. Now I will admit, that there has been a lot of road con­struc­tion on the street that I rode down on, so it’s under­stand­able as to why there was debris on the road, but it’s still inex­cus­able.  That road is the pri­mary route that cyclists from Tustin’s sub­ur­ban neigh­bor­hoods take to reach the “Moun­tain to Sea” bike trail. The city has been work­ing on that road for months now and they still haven’t got­ten the job done. I’m all for main­tain­ing streets and mak­ing improve­ments to our road­ways, but it has to be done in an effi­cient and safe man­ner. Clos­ing off lanes mul­ti­ple times a week, for con­struc­tion that is tak­ing months to com­plete, is a clear waste of time and money. When the work­ers don’t even have the decency to prop­erly clean their site after they are done, they show utter dis­re­spect to the good money that the city’s tax­pay­ers are pay­ing them, and they even go so far to dis­re­gard the safety of oth­ers. I under­stand that get­ting flat tires is a part of cycling, and that it hap­pens to every­one. But when tubes cost six dol­lars a piece, and three of my flat tires were due to debris on  the City of Tustin’s roads, I think the city should start com­pen­sat­ing  cyclists  the flat tires that they receive. After all, it is the city’s shoddy main­te­nance efforts that are caus­ing all of these flats.

After return­ing home I went out to REI to pur­chase some new tubes, another CO2 car­tridge, and a bike pump. I used Alex Guichet’s thought­ful gift­card to make these pur­chases, and when I returned home I set out on fix­ing my flat tire. I did the usual steps, tak­ing off the rear wheel, pop­ping off the tire, tak­ing out the old tube, then putting in the new one. How­ever, when I put in the new tube it felt oddly large in com­par­i­son to the other tubes that I used. I checked the tube’s box, and to my cha­grin it turns out that I bought 32CC tire tubes, instead of the 23CC tubes that I needed. I was obvi­ously hav­ing a dyslexic moment and got the 2 and 3 mixed up while pick­ing out the tubes. For­tu­nately, I had one good 23CC tube left, and I used that to make my repair.

Some­how my small  hand­pump broke while try­ing to par­tially inflate my replace­ment 23CC tube. This of course only added to the frus­tra­tion of the day, as I had only used the hand­pump six times, and four of the times were to par­tially inflate replace­ment tubes. Not only was I with­out a hand­pump, but I was with­out my pri­mary tool for par­tially inflat­ing replace­ment tubes. I hooked up the tube to my new bike pump and all was well. I put the tube within the tire, popped the tire on the rim, and put the whole wheel onto my bike frame. After that, I gave my bike a thor­ough clean­ing, and cleaned off the chain.

As it turns out, the air com­pres­sor that I used to inflate my bike tires, was only able to deliver about 90 PSI. Unfor­tu­nately, the min­i­mum pres­sure for my tires is 100PSI, with a max­i­mum pres­sure being 120PSI. I fig­ured the 10 PSI wouldn’t make that much of a dif­fer­ence while rid­ing (besides with all the debris on Tustin’s roads it’s usu­ally bet­ter to have lower pres­sures to avoid punc­tures, and flats), so I  shied away from buy­ing a proper pump. How­ever, after get­ting the tires up to their proper pres­sure, I totally regret not spring­ing for a proper pump ear­lier. After tak­ing the bike on a short test ride around the block, I noticed a big dif­fer­ence. The bike han­dled bet­ter, was faster, and ulti­mately felt more pow­er­ful  and all because I added an extra 20 PSI into my tires.

Aside from forc­ing me to buy a proper pump, I would say that it was a frus­trat­ing day to be a cyclist. I got a flat tire, bought the wrong tubes, my hand­pump broke, and most impor­tantly, I was out of a per­fectly good day of rid­ing. I’m just hop­ing that REI will allow me to exchange my tubes for the proper ones, and I’m won­der­ing if my front tire will ever get a flat. Right now, the rear tire is tak­ing all the abuse.

After four years of duti­ful ser­vice, my com­puter came down with a case of the “spon­ta­neous BSOD’s” last Fri­day. The symp­toms were well… con­cern­ing. I would turn on the com­puter, it would past post, and then after pass­ing the “load­ing win­dows” splash screen it would BSOD and restart before I could read the error mes­sage. At first I thought it was a hard­ware prob­lem. After all, I hadn’t installed any new pro­grams or updated any dri­vers, so there wasn’t a rea­son for Win­dows to crash out of the blue.  So I swapped around my RAM, unplugged my sound card, and opti­cal drive (in case they were the cause of the prob­lem), reset my CMOS, but by the the end of it all, I was still get­ting BSODs. I con­cluded that I was faced with a soft­ware prob­lem, and opted to wait until the next day to start work on fix­ing my computer.

Sat­ur­day rolled around, and I began search­ing a vari­ety of forums to find a solu­tion to my prob­lem. In between forum searches I hap­pened to check my email, and in my inbox was an email from Chap­man Uni­ver­sity. The email said that Chap­man was unable to down­load my sup­ple­ments from the Com­mon­app web­site, and that I would have to fax them over to them. “No big deal” I thought, until I real­ized that all of my sup­ple­ments were still on the com­puter that just crashed. Using all of the infor­ma­tion that I had gath­ered from the forums, I began try­ing dif­fer­ent  things to fix my com­puter. First I put in the Win­dows XP disk, and used a vari­ety of com­mands in the recov­ery con­sole to try and fix the prob­lem. That didn’t work, so I then used the recov­ery option on the Win­dows install disk.

The recov­ery option actu­ally seemed to work really well. It rein­stalled all of the essen­tial XP files, while it kept all of my old data intact. After about forty five min­utes, the recov­ery was done and my com­puter restarted. Win­dows loaded up nor­mally, and with­out a BSOD, how­ever it got stuck on the black “Win­dows is load­ing Please Wait”  screen. I thought to myself “Oh Crap” as I wasn’t sure if Win­dows was still installing some­thing, yet at the same time being stuck on such a screen for over 20 min­utes was unchar­ac­ter­is­tic. I opted to pull the plug and restart. To my glee, the com­puter started nor­mally. I got a log-in screen, which had all of my user accounts, and all things con­sid­ered it looked like my com­puter was actu­ally recov­ered. How­ever, my ela­tion was only short lived as I logged into my main account to encounter another BSOD. No, it wasn’t a “Blue Screen of Death” instead it was a “Black Screen of Death”. The com­puter loaded nor­mally, I even heard the nor­mal win­dows start up music, but instead of pre­sent­ing me with a desk­top, all I had was a black screen and a cursor.

I dou­ble backed and checked the forums for infor­ma­tion on this new prob­lem. Some claimed it was an issue with the video card, oth­ers a dri­ver issue, but  I con­cluded that it was both of these and in fact a video card dri­ver issue. Even though I had pos­tu­lated the cause of the prob­lem, it did me no good as I needed a desk­top in order to prop­erly fix it. I booted up in a vari­ety of modes includ­ing “Safe Mode”, and “VGA Mode” among oth­ers, but I still had the Black Screens. I even­tu­ally got a screen when I logged into “Safe Mode” as an admin­is­tra­tor. My imme­di­ate plan was to sim­ply nav­i­gate my way over to my sup­ple­ment files, back them up to my exter­nal hard drive, and then for­mat the entire drive, and rein­stall win­dows. But things weren’t so simple.

While all of my pro­grams were installed, only a frac­tion of the computer’s data was avail­able to me for some rea­son. I had some ran­dom pic­tures that I saved, and a few mean­ing­less open office doc­u­ments. But the bulk of my data, my music, videos, and (most impor­tantly) my word doc­u­ments, sim­ply could not be found. After doing some more search­ing, I even­tu­ally located the folder that had all of the data from my main user account. I clicked to open it and I got a hor­ri­ble error mes­sage “This user’s folder can­not be accessed”.

My heart was shat­tered, after work­ing for hours on the damn com­puter, and get­ting so close to being able to access my data I was inex­plic­a­bly denied. To make mat­ters worse, I looked at the prop­er­ties for that folder, and every­thing read zero; zero bytes, zero items, zero fold­ers.  A user on a forum sug­gested using a Linux Live CD as a last resort for try­ing to access my data. After tak­ing a half an hour research­ing how to make one, I burnt my Live CD, put it in, and was met with the same result. The user account folder that had all of my data, was inex­plic­a­bly empty. I thought to my self “Crap it’s all gone”, defeated, I began re-writing my supplements.

After wast­ing my Sun­day re-writing my supplements,I con­tacted a good old friend, Owen Kue­merle, and asked if he could hook me up with a stu­dent copy of Win­dows 7. He said he could, and on Mon­day I began installing the new oper­at­ing sys­tem. Now first and fore­most, I have never been one to adopt new tech­nol­ogy right as it first comes out. For one, it sel­dom works prop­erly, and two it’s usu­ally avail­able at a frac­tion of the start­ing price, six months down the road. I really only planned to get Win­dows 7 when it was time to make another major upgrade (like get­ting a new motherboard/processor), but con­sid­er­ing that I couldn’t res­ur­rect my data and that I would have to refor­mat my hard drive any­ways, I fig­ured it was worth pay­ing $30 for the new and improved oper­at­ing system.

After about an hour of instal­la­tion, I was sur­prised with a Christ­mas mir­a­cle of sorts. In my first time using the newly installed oper­at­ing sys­tem, I found a nice folder called “Old Win­dows” and in it, I found all of my data, which was com­pletely acces­si­ble and intact. I quickly plugged in my exter­nal hard drive, and began copy­ing every­thing on to it. I then accessed a file from the exter­nal hard drive just to make sure it was the real deal, and in fact it was. Happy that Win­dows 7 had some­how res­ur­rected the data that not even the almighty Linux could save, my expe­ri­ence with the new OS was off to a good start.

Right off the bat Win­dows 7 feels fast. Things don’t nec­es­sar­ily load much faster than they used to on XP, but every­thing is so fluid and crisp that it just feels sat­is­fy­ing see­ing pro­grams pop-up. Because this OS was designed in the era of multi-core proces­sors, multi-tasking is much bet­ter because it seems as if both cores are uti­lized bet­ter. Peo­ple often com­plain that the RAM usage is up, but my com­puter usu­ally uses around 35% of my 2GB of RAM when web-surfing with Fire­fox. This actu­ally isn’t that bad con­sid­er­ing that Fire­fox is a mem­ory hog, and that 35% of 2GB of RAM is noth­ing. I absolutely love the new “Aero” visual theme, and I think it adds a lot of class, sophis­ti­ca­tion, and ele­gance to Win­dows 7. Peo­ple com­plain that the new task bar is a lot like OS X’s “dock”, but I say “Who cares?”  Win­dows 7’s imple­men­ta­tion is much bet­ter. For me the dock was always a bit of a nui­sance, leav­ing it up all the time made the OS seem unnat­ural, using the mag­ni­fi­ca­tion was dis­tract­ing, but not using it made the dock seem stale. The new task bar has all the func­tion­al­ity of the dock, and its com­par­a­tive sim­plic­ity makes it seem more effi­cient and less like a gimmick.

With that being said, Win­dows 7 does have its share of short­com­ings. The OS still takes a lot longer than I would like to load. Though I imag­ine this is because my hard drive was not for­mat­ted when the new OS was installed,  and thus it still has a bunch of XP’s junk data to sort through. The desk­top icons are really big, which is okay for now, but I can imag­ine that being an issue once I got more stuff on the com­puter. I find some of the added “fea­tures”, like “gad­gets”  and “UAC” to be com­pletely use­less and things that I never use. Finally, the way Win­dows 7 han­dles sound is baf­fling, and I had some ini­tial issues get­ting my sound card to work properly.

All in all, I am just happy that I didn’t have a Mac when this hap­pened. Had I owned a Mac, I wouldn’t have been able to prop­erly trou­bleshoot my com­puter.  Chances are I would have either had to pay a hefty $300 fee to get the com­puter back on its feet, or I would have had to buy a new com­puter all together. I am also happy that it wasn’t a hard­ware issue that caused Win­dows to crash because I think it’s a tes­ta­ment to the qual­ity that I put into build­ing this com­puter. While it is true that I did have to re-write all of my Chap­man sup­ple­ments, at the end of the day I did get all of my data back, I learned a lot by try­ing to fix the com­puter myself, and I still got an improved oper­at­ing sys­tem for just $30. I don’t think any­one that’s a “Mac” could claim the same thing if this hap­pened to them. Oh, and the com­mon­app can go die for almost jeop­ar­diz­ing my admis­sion process at Chap­man. There’s a rea­son why we do things elec­tron­i­cally, and it’s so that we don’t have to waste paper by fax­ing appli­ca­tions over.