The current Campagnolo bar-end shifters looks like something out of the 90’s, because they are. They literally haven’t updated their design for more than a decade, not even to their 11-speed standard that they converted to in 2008. It’s atrocious, and I really think they’re missing a solid chunk of the triathlon market on that.
The only way to run 11-speed Campagnolo casettes with bar-end shifters is by using non-indexed friction shifters (both Shimano’s and, as far as I know, Campagnolo’s own can do this), just like the 80’s where I got my first race bike with down-tube shifters and SunTour components. Ah, nostalgia… I could get used to that again, possibly even enjoy it, but I don’t think people who learned to ride race bikes within the last 15 years would feel the same.
Please make bar-end shifters compatible with your 11-speed groupsets, it’s very important to us triathletes, because triathlon is not just like bike time trials. We really need low gears to get through to the run in good shape (and an 11-speed cassette helps here), and because we’re just not as bike fit and with the same top-end as our bike racing specialist brethren.
I think you’re missing a significant market by not having such shifters available.
Roughly 2 million bonus point if you come up with something as elegant and ergonomic as the SRAM R2C and Zipp VukaR2C levers. Maybe even license the R2C system, although I can understand if you think you can do better.
I have an original full-size Campagnolo wine-bottle opener, and it’s amazingly brilliant in its simplicity and function, I drink more wine just because I enjoy using it; apply that kind of thinking to triathlon/time-trial bar-end shifters and world domination on all better triathlon bikes is assured.
Or maybe you’re betting on your electronic shifting system (long time no see, cancelled?). Please don’t, because I’m pretty sure that’ll be priced outside my and many other triathletes’ range.
Yours truly
Morten Liebach
Oh, and by the way, if you feel like writing Campagnolo and telling them something like the above, please don’t hesitate, but be aware the the contact page require you to fill in a “state”, but it’s greyed out when you select Denmark as country because we don’t have states (duh!), so I lied and claimed to be from Hawaii. Stupid little validation error. I’ve alerted them to that too.
On 2010-01-02 around 10:30, after having talked to my wife on the phone while she was on her way back home, I realized my love for her was gone. It was the emotional equivalent of a baseball bat to the head, and I spent the next while lying curled up on he floor crying, then another hour staring out the window completely and utterly lost.
There had been signs months—perhaps even years—earlier, but as always, you live life forwards, but understand it backwards. That’s how such big things can suddenly hit you apparently out of the blue.
My love was broken beyond repair, though I—and we—tried very hard to fix it. January was the hardest month of my life. I landed a new job in that period after having gone unemployed for 74 days, and I’d normally be ecstatic about that, but instead I just felt relieved that I’d get to be away from home a good 40 hours a week.
So we decided on a divorce, or more precisely, getting separated. We’ve sent in the paperwork, and last week-end Mette Marie and the kids moved to Trige. Saying goodbye to the kids was absolutely heartbreaking.
We now have a very nice apartment for sale, 200 m from Islands Brygge metro station, a little further to the IT University and the national radio concert hall and less than 2 km from Copenhagen city hall. And I have enjoyed that I could go for a run and within 2 minutes be on paths on Amager Fælled that can last for up to 10 km runs without being repetitive. We’ve been privileged living in such a great place, and we’re going to miss it.
Oh, and I’m looking for an apartment to rent for when we get this one sold.
I was at Open Source Days 2010 today, and met a lot of my normally online friends in real life, which is always great, but had to talk about the divorce. It was tough, but you were all sorry and understanding and everything. Thanks. It helped me tremendously to just talk about it, getting it out in the open. I feel a lump in my throat just writing this. Better stop now.
I think this is what I’ll write about the divorce here. Deliberately kept short (kind of, I’d originally envisioned something half the length), because I could go on for a long time about a billion things, but it’s private, painful and, I think, bad form to do so.
I have all my domains set up on my Google Apps Premier account. That way I get to use the great Google spam mail filters and I don’t have to run and maintain my own mail server and spam filters, which is definitely nice, I can play with that sort of thing at work instead.
When I’m on my laptop I almost always use Mail.app, but on all other computers I use the web interface.
All mail filtering is done serverside by Google, all Gmail tags appear as folders in Mail.app, and I keep as much logic on the serverside as possible, storing everything serverside, never deleting anything.
The “All Mail” mailbox is then used as trash by selecting the mailbox in the mailboxes pane, clicking “Mailbox” → “Use This Mailbox For” → select “Trash”. This makes deleting a mail in Mail.app equivalent to archiving it (‘e’ with keyboard shortcuts enabled) in the web interface. One problem though; I just discovered that Mail.app no longer displays the “All Mail” folder on Snow Leopard. Maybe that happened in the upgrade from Leopard… let me know if you know.
In addition I set up Gmail filters so that mailinglist email gets tagged with the list name and then archived straight away, so I never see them directly in my inbox, only when I dive into the appropriate folder. This way the mail that appear when I open Mail.app is something I have to read and process, and I either do this straight away and then delete it (archive), or I flag it (⇧⌘L) to return to it later, as this is much easier than using an “Action” folder like the inbox zero system prescribes. I really hate moving mail between folders manually, it’s a high cost operation.
And that’s it, that’s how I handle mail. Simple and efficient.
I like the paid version of Google Apps for the lack of advertising and extra features. It was a pleasant surprise when I found out that you could have as many domains as you wanted on the same Google Apps account, the only limitation being that you’re not given complete liberty at administering mailboxnames acrosss all domains, meaning that if you have the ‘asdf’ mailbox on one domain, you have it on all of the other domains too. No problem in real life though.
In a somewhat worrying piece of news, security firm Symantec has released the top search terms by kids in 2009. Topping the lists: “YouTube,” “Google,” “Facebook,” “sex” and “porn.”
There are no more useless key on a keyboard than CapsLock. I always map it to Control instead, that’s far more useful. This is a little reminder to myself on how to do it. Because I always forget.
Mac OS X
Open System Preferences, click on Keyboard and select the Keyboard tab. Click on the “Modifier Keys…” button in the lower right corner, and then set Caps Lock to whatever you want. I think you should want Control.
FreeBSD
Save the code below as /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-input.fdi, and make sure you have hald(8) running (hald_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf).
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?><!-- Save as /usr/local/etc/hal/fdi/policy/x11-input.fdi on FreeBSD --><deviceinfoversion="0.2"><device><!-- Allow Ctrl-Alt-Backspace to kill the X server. This is the old default behavior, which I prefer. --><matchkey="info.capabilities"contains="input.keyboard"><mergekey="input.x11_options.XkbOptions"type="string">
terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp
</merge></match><!-- Map CapsLock to Control. Can't be done in xorg.conf anymore. From http://blog.zomgepix.org/2009/06/death-to-caps-lock.html --><matchkey="info.capabilities"contains="input.keyboard"><mergekey="input.x11_options.XkbOptions"type="string">
ctrl:nocaps
</merge></match></device></deviceinfo>
Sometimes hald(8) can be hard to kill completely, so reboot to make sure it works.
Paste the code below into a file ending in .reg and double-click it.
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Keyboard Layout]
"Scancode Map"=hex:00,00,00,00,00,00,00,00,02,00,00,00,1d,00,3a,00,00,00,00,00
Around this time, 10 years ago, I was creating my first homepage.
I used the hostname for the static IP my ISP, Stofanet, gave me and running it on my Linux PC. Sometimes I rebooted down into Windows 98 to play Quake II…
I think the site was just index.html, about.html and contact.html plus a stylesheet. I used Netscape 4.x and was a pretty early adopter of CSS and XHTML, the latter had just become an official recommendation at that time, although the very first iteration was HTML 4.01 as far as I remember.
So, happy 10-year anniversary to this site. Althought it has had several names, it has been one long progression for me as the author. And I am happy to say that this blog contains everything I’ve ever blogged since I started blogging in 2003, for better or worse.
My disk died two days ago, and lamenting my loss on Facebook everybody told me to get an SSD. The peer pressure was immense.
I’d thought of a 7200 rpm 320 GB disk, it would have been a nice upgrade from the dead 120 GB 5400 rpm disk, but educating myself on SSDs it became abundantly clear that an Intel X25-M was the way to go.
The price was scary though, around €670, and that was too much. So I was going to buy a mechanical disk until I found the X25-M for €430 at Dustin Home. And not only that, they were also the only webshop that claimed to have it in stock. So I ordered it yesterday morning, and 24 hours later it was delivered.
I had rigged an old Maxtor firewire disk as an interim solution, since I didn’t know for how long I’d have to wait for the new disk, but the Maxtor was starting to emit clicking noises that scared me, so I was happy that I got a new disk.
I have replaced the disk in a PowerBook G4 once, and that was a really annoying and complicated operation, I never got the laptop perfectly assembled afterwards, so I was a little apprehensive. Then I found the OWC Install Video and it didn’t look too bad.
I got the laptop opened up without incident, the only real problem was getting the dead disk out because the wires on top of it was glued on pretty well, and I had to get them off to get the disk out. It took 10 minutes prying those wires off, I ended up using a knife blade to loosen them.
But that was the only tricky part, putting it all back together again with the SSD was easy. Clearly Apple have also improved that part of their design since the PowerBook days.
Powering up again, booting on the firewire disk, Mac OS X whined a little about not being able to read the disk. No cause for alarm though, it was just because there were no partitions on it. In Disk Utility.app the SSD was found as “160.04 GB INTEL SSDSA2M160G2GC Media”, and it just worked normally from there on, partitioning, formatting and then making a clean install.
And the performance: Wow!
Booting is much faster, logging on too. When I click on Safari the icon hardly have time to bounce in the dock before the browser is running. It’s insane. The improvement is just as big when I run VMware. I won’t go back to mechanical disks again if I can in any way help it.
SSDs are still costly, but their performance is so good that they’re clearly worth it. As they come down in price, they just get more and more attractive.
