Category: Unrelated News

At what point does it become cheaper to buy a bicycle tube than to keep patching it?

After I got my bike back from the bike shop, I got a flat within a week. I pulled the tube to repair it and found that there was a pretty good size cut in the tire. The bike shop did not replace the rim tape when they put the new rims on. The old rim tape was stiff and carried a lot of rust from the old rims.

The purpose of rim tape is to keep the lugs that hold the spokes onto the rims from poking into the tube. Good rim tape will protect the tube well. Good rims won’t be caked with rust. Old rusty-crusty rim tape on brand new aluminum rims somewhat defeat the purpose for having new rims installed.

I patched the hole. I was not able to get to the bike shop to buy rim tape. Then a few days later I patched the hole again. The patch did not hold, so I placed another patch on the tire the next day. No good. Today I removed both old patches and put on another patch. After getting the tire blown up and almost on the bike…PSSSssssttt! New patch removed and number 5 installed. This one seems to be holding for the moment.

Much of this was my fault as I was not patient with putting the patches on. The glue was not dry enough when I slapped the patches in place. After a bit of googling I learned how to do it right.

New tube = $1.20

5 patches = $0.60

I guess I can put about 5 more on before springing for that new tube. And, when I do make it back to the bike shop, I will be picking up a couple rolls of rim tape.

By the way, the bike shop I am going to now is not the same one that held my bike hostage for several days.

We will be celebrating the 4th by going to the beach and cooking hamburgers or hot dogs on the grill.

It is a bit difficult to get into the spirit of the 4th of July when you are living in a foreign country. We do have a party that the consulate is putting on tomorrow, but we don’t feel comfortable with all the drinking that is planned.

We have not found any fireworks yet, but we may be able to make that part of our day as well.

The fun thing is to just be together as a family knowing we are from the greatest nation in the world. While we won’t be celebrating with all the hoopla people back home will be, we will still have our own fun.

Here’s to wishing everyone a happy 4th of July.

We had an interesting storm a couple of nights ago. We are currently in rainy season, which is the same as hurricane season. Hmm, interesting how that works.

Normally we only get rain in the afternoon between 3:00 and 6:00. But with this strange storm we had come through, it broke loose at 2:00 in the morning. That meant that in our sleep deprived stupor, we were running around trying to get things shut down and unplugged.

Since there is only one outlet in my office, it is pretty easy to unplug the 16 items plugged into the 4 daisy chained power strips. Fortunately we never lost power in all of this. Quite surprising too since the lightning bolt that woke us up felt like it was right out our window. We bounced out of the hammocks and clung to the ceiling before the light and noise left the room. Then we bumped into each other trying to figure out what needed to be unplugged.

When it was all over we laid back down and I thought about needing to unplug one more item–the telephone line to the DSL modem. I did not do it though. The lightning was essentially gone by then. I don’t know if that was the culprit, but the next day our modem would connect to the Internet just fine, but would not connect to the internal network. My computer’s network card is dead as well as my PCI bus.

Our son’s computer is just flaky. In Windows no USB device will work, and the only PCI device that works is the video card. Also the keyboard is dead. In Linux the keyboard works, but PCI devices (except the video card) are all dead along with the USB devices.

We were without an Internet connection most of yesterday. I was finally able to get a new modem at the ISP’s office in the late afternoon. They replaced the modem with no charge. That was a surprise to me since I don’t have a contract with them and I bought my modem outright instead of renting from them monthly.

Still trying to figure out what to do with these two crippled machines. One is my main box, but I am able to work with my notebook on the Internet and transfer files through a USB flash drive from the big box.

This means my website updates that I was hoping to finish on Thursday have been seriously delayed. Maybe by Saturday night I will have them up and running.

Last week we went to the newly opened Little Caesar’s Pizza in town. They have a big foam Caesar mascot. The kind that a person can get into. A big puppet.

Though this was just standing in the corner of the store, our daughter was fascinated by it. The puppet was wearing the traditional orange Little Caesar’s toga.

Our daughter’s first words when she saw it was, “Daddy, he’s wearing a sack!”