Matthew Botos

Building up my “new” singles speed bike wasn’t quite as easy as stripping it down. A few snags earned it a difficulty rating of 1, as measured by unplanned trips to Home Depot.

Running just a 32-tooth chain ring and bash guard on the front meant cutting down some bolts with a Dremel, and getting the chain tensioner screwed in required a bigger bolt to re-cut the stripped threads. The tensioner itself was a bit confusing; after taking it apart to swap bolts, I couldn’t get all the pieces together again, but found it worked fine without one. The final product isn’t as light as a purpose-built single speed, but it’s still quite respectable and a bit more meaningful to have my old frame under me again.

Single speeds are all the rage these days; I finally gave in and decided to build one out of my old purple Trek hardtail. It’s been imprisoned in a trainer in the basement since I put a fatal bend in the derailleur hanger three years ago. Now it’s being reborn with a cheap conversion project.

It’s nice to be able to wrench on a bike again, and fun stripping off all the “extraneous” shifters and chainrings. It was also a welcome excuse to buy more tools and parts. Shopping for single speed bits is a real grab bag, too: all kinds of things have evolved in the varied single speed ecosystem. When it’s done, it should be a fun ride for more mellow trails and for messier winter weather.

Owning a home is a constant learning experience. When I replaced my furnace, I learned to always get multiple quotes. Now that I’m dealing with the water heater, I’m amazed at the range of quotes, from $600 to $2000! A better value has been the free opinions, including the suggestion that the water heater is fine and the expansion tank is broken.

This small tank on the cold water side has air on one side of a rubber diaphragm to absorb water pressure and keep the blow-off valve from opening and dumping water on the floor. A replacement tank was just $30, and installation took only half an hour and included the usual small shower that accompanies any amateur plumbing project. It’s reduced the amount of water released by the blow-off valve, but I’ve still got to dial in the tank’s air pressure, which is supposed to be equal to that of the incoming water.

This Wall Street Journal article on ski resort deals includes some interesting facts on the changing face of the sport:

The average resort visitor last season was 35.1 years old, up from 33.2 in the 1997-98 season, according to the NSAA. About 30% were 45 or over.

Over the past two decades, competition has pushed hundreds of smaller resorts out of business because the areas couldn’t afford upgrades or snowmaking equipment to weather lean snow years. There were 478 ski areas in the U.S. last year, compared with 735 in 1984, according to the NSAA.

Part of my grand simplification plan was to drop my VOIP phone service and just have a single cell phone line. Only it’s not quite that easy; it seems I’m still on a one-year contract. To Packet8’s credit, though, they did find a cheaper option than canceling outright and paying the termination fee.; it’ll just take a few more months to cut the cord.

There also turn out to be a lot of hidden costs in VOIP now that it’s gotten popular enough to attract regulation. A $20 plan quickly climbs to $26 with taxes, 911 fees, and other surcharges. That’s a 30% increase you’ll only find alluded to in the fine print and on your first bill.

It’s nice to follow-up my previous post on Comcast and Verizon by reporting that they’ve both managed to get their acts together without any more effort on my part. My usual selection of cable channels is back, and the DSL is up and working.

Also, though I’ve swapped between DSL and cable at least once before in each direction, it’s still a bit of pain to reconfigure things. We’re not quite yet at the point where generic Internet comes out of the wall as water or electricity, no matter who’s providing it. If you could do that, and get decent pricing without committing to a one-year contract, we might see some real competition in high-speed Internet pricing.

Between getting HDTV and DSL, I’ve had a first-hand chance to experience the service of rivals Comcast and Verizon. They’re both obviously trying to up their level of customer service to win and keep customers in a competitive and saturated market. They still come up short sometimes, though, and occasionally in amusing ways.

Comcast first; after installing HD but screwing up my old channels, they promised to return 3 days later to fix it. They’ve narrowed their window to 2 hours, and I figured I was safe with the 2nd window of the day. I got a call with ten minutes left to say the tech was on the way, and another call at the end of the window to check on his arrival, which hadn’t happened. When the ETA came back as 45 minutes past the end of the appointment, I had to reschedule. I pressed them about an appointment guarantee, and did get a $20 credit.

Verizon should’ve had no trouble with DSL; I’ve had it at this address before. Their tech was outside first thing the day they said it’d be ready, and knocked on the door to let me know. After clunking through their install CD and an hour with tech support, they promised to send someone out Monday and I gave them my cell as a contact. I never heard anything, but found a message on my home phone that everything. The tech had come out, checked the line, and needed to know what the modem was doing. Aside from calling the wrong number, so far so good. Then he started rambling about how everyone else he was out to lunch except him, so he was just going to be sitting around waiting.

Both get mixed reviews so far; we’ll see how they fare with actually getting things to work.

I finally got a chance to sit down and watch a movie on the new DVD player and HDTV Sunday night. It was a much better test that watching isolated clips or freeze frames. Some scenes aren’t as clear or detailed as others, and watching a whole film gives you a better balance.

The result was pleasing; the upconverting on the DVD player did a good job of filling in higher resolution and large size of the TV. Keeping up with action sequences was no problem, and the text in the menus looked clearer. It should be good enough to keep me from thinking about HD DVD and Bluray for a while…

After getting an HDTV, Comcast surprisingly offered me an late Saturday afternoon appointment two days from when I called and also didn’t scoff at the request for two CableCards for my Tivo Series 3. The tech figured out the Tivo quickly enough for not having used one before - another point for the Tivo interface - and had the HD working soon enough. There seemed to be some missing channels elsewhere, but being an hour late to meetup with friends, I had to leave it for later.

Later ended up being 11:30 at night. The HD channels looked great; you could see every hair, pore, and bead of sweat. Below them, however, was a pretty big gap until the basic broadcast channels; all the typical “cable” channels had dissapeared! Comcast staffs their empire 24-7, but while they sent commands to the CableCards, it didn’t fix the problem. So I’ll be waiting for another tech to come out Tuesday morning and enjoying the new HD channels in the meantime.

Ever buy a DVD, put in the player you paid for, and have it tell you that you can’t do what you want? A wonderful “feature” called User Operation Prohibition (UOP) lets the disc enforce restrictions such as not skipping the FBI warning, or more sinisterly, the movie company’s previews. While it’s easy enough to find software players that ignore these artificial restrictions, doing it in a hardware player is a bit tougher.

Fortunately, dedicated hackers are on the job; Tom’s Panasonic firmware site offers firmware updates for several Panasonic players that disable this annoyance as well as free you to watch DVDs from other regions of the world. It works like a charm; I bought an S52S player this afternoon, burned a CD, and now have total control of my DVDs!