Saturday Stuff

Boy, today was rough.
My heart rate didn't want to settle down and my legs felt like Bill Cosby's favorite snack.
Yet I soldiered on!
I must for today was packet pick up for the Haleiwa Metric Century, which is oh oh! next week.
Do not fear for me dear readers, for I am ready!
As ready as I'll ever be.
Okay, not really.
I could have put in more miles, but hey! I'm lazy.
Well, not that lazy, but lazy enough to be dangerous.
So anyways today, I tried out a new chain lube.



If you've been following along at home, you, the reader, know that I had some noise trouble with old chain lube.
Well, being sort of scientific and all, I went and cleaned the chain, and used the old stuff, Chain-l, again.
Well, the noise went away, and all was good for about 125 miles, when I cleaned the chain again.
This time though, I used that Rock N Roll stuff, Absolute Dry formula, not to be confused with the Extreme formula which is blue.
I used the blue stuff before and it worked pretty well, and I thought that this dry stuff would keep my chain from getting all black and gritty.
Well, it kept the chain and cassette clean:



So clean in fact it looks like there's nothing on there.
Seriously, I ran my finger on the chain and hardly anything came off:



Absolutely dry and absolutely not good.
My shifting went south and I spent half the ride adjusting the cable. There's also some drive train noise that wasn't there before.
From what I've been reading, this Campagnolo stuff is kinda tricky to set up though once you got it set up it's all good.
Well, I guess it sort of likes a certain type of lube and let me tell you it doesn't like this one.
The Campagnolo I mean, doesn't like the Rock N Roll red.
When I got home, I doused the chain with Pro Gold and went down the street. Shifting improved, back to normal.
So what's this all mean?
Nothing.
All it means is that this lube didn't work for me today.
Will I try it again?
Probably not for that clean chain looks a little too clean, sort of like I'm running around without any chain lube.
When it all comes down to it, I'd rather have a dirty looking clean shifting chain rather than a clean dirty shifting one.
If you get my drift.
So I cleaned my chain again, and tomorrow I'll try out the Boeshield again.
That's another dry lube but it worked well before, it just didn't last too long.
Something tells me though that I'm going to go back to the Chain-l eventually.
If it's quiet and shifts good, I'll take the grime.
Also, I got some new bar tape!
Yes, again.
That plain Cinelli cork tape was tough on the hands so I got me some gel tape.
More on that tomorrow.
Maybe.

Shift, the Red Kind, the Weather Kind

So I woke up early this morning and was watching the Olympic coverage.
It's sort of cloudy here so I'm not sure if a ride is on the planner.
I'm watching Matt Lauer run with the Olympic torch; this year's torch is actually pretty cool looking:



Well like many things that get posted on here, I'm not really sure why, but the word(s) red shift popped into my head.
What the hell is a red shift?
No, it's not a new set of twelve speed STI shifters from SRAM.
In the context that I was thinking about, it refers to a measurement of light from receding galaxies.
See way back in the Dark Ages, when Einstein (it's raining now, just thought I'd let you know) was putting together all his relativity stuff, he made what he called his "greatest blunder:"
He assumed the Universe was static.
Well it seems that there was evidence at the time that stars were moving around out there in space, but the movement detected was deemed insignificant.
Or something like that.
Poor Einstein!
Bet you he wished he had forked over the $39.95 for the broadband so he could get Wikipedia!
Well this stuff also ties into a debate over what the hell the Universe looked like.
See back then, kinda like now, no one had any idea what outer space was all about. Two men, Shapely and Curtis, had a big brouhaha in 1920 over the shape of the Universe. Shapely thought it was small, Curtis imagined it was humongous:



Well, we all know who won that bet.
Anyways, Edwin Hubble was up on Mount Wilson in California looking through his telescope. He and another astronomy geek named Vesto Slipher who worked at Lowell Observatory in Arizona were interested in the red shifts of galaxies and stars(the stars are known as Cepheids, I don't remember why).
Red shift, to put it simply, is an observable shift in the color spectrum of objects moving away from us.
Us on Earth I mean.
So anyway, around 1929 Hubble and a guy named Milton Humason(who started off as a janitor!) put it all together and figured out that holy crap! the Universe is freakin expanding!
Einstein did a major face palm.
Hubble got a constant.
Oh, and he got a telescope:



Well it's not really his telescope.
But it is named after him.
So what has this got to do with the Olympic torch?
I don't really know. I suppose they are related somehow.
In my mind anyways.
Well, guess I'll go and clean my chain in case it stops raining:



There's bound to be a shift in the weather.
The weather here is not static.
Though sometimes I wish it was.