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I love my Preston. Very, very happy with it, but I realize it’s not the state of the art from an engineering perspective. The following post appeared a few days ago on the mtbr.com Transition forum, and I totally agree with it – even if I’m not going to trade in my Preston anytime soon.

I made the change from a 2007 Preston to a 2008 Nomad a couple of months ago and my only regret is that I didn’t do it sooner. IMO the Nomad is superior in every way. Lighter, more travel, and you can really tell with every pedal stroke that the suspension design is more sophisticated. Where the Preston was harsh and I could never get it dialed in to eliminate bob and still feel plush, the Nomad feels amazingly plush and bottomless but is rock solid under pedaling. The real wheel moves back slightly when it hits obstacles, so you just glide right over them. The difference is enough that I regularly find myself cleaning technical obstacles I never did on the Preston. I too was worried about the longer chainstays and slacker angles on the Nomad, but like the Preston, the Nomad has a relatively short toptube which keeps it nimble. It doesn’t feel “choppered out” at all and climbs better than the tank-like Preston. By all reports, the Nomad is just as strong as the Preston too (well, stronger really, with all those broken Prestons out there lately. In fairness it sounds like that was probably just a bad batch of welding though).Don’t get me wrong, the Preston’s not a bad bike. I like that Transition is a small grassroots company with a cool reputation (rather than the yuppie association that SC has) and their bikes are a great value, not to mention better-looking than the weird humpy Nomad. But if you can afford the Nomad, it has a whole world of advantages with no real disadvantages. I hated the Preston at Whistler, it just didn’t have enough travel. Then for smooth XC trails, it felt too heavy. The range of riding it was well-suited for was a lot narrower than the Nomad, which can be ridden at the bike park and XC trails and everything in between. I mostly credit this to the VPP suspension, along with the lighter weight allowed by engineered, hydroformed tubing, which Transition really does not have the resources for. I think Transition’s engineering is more experience-based than technology-based, which doesn’t really give the same degree of sophistication IMO.

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I have recently subscribed to Alpinist, a truly wonderful magazine; there was this very funny cartoon here that I just had to share with my climbing friends. So I took my D70s, grabbed a picture and here it is: version 10.0 Climbing Partner.

By the way, I wonder why there is no such thing here in Italy as Alpinist or Dirt Rag ?

Situation: you are in the train with no ticket. The ticket inspector asks for your ticket. You lower your voice, and say:

“My name is Jack Bauer, I am following a suicide bomber who’s right now on this train. Walk away and don’t look back”.

Situation: you need a car to do your shopping for the weekend. You spot a guy entering his Corvette, so you punch him in the face and while he’s down, shout:

Today a very good thing happened to me, but it was followed by a very bad thing. Anyway I won’t talk about good or bad things here because they’re personal.

For now all I want is to point the casual reader to a blog (travelogue, climbing diary, don’t know how’s gonna be shaped) which was just started by a good friend of mine, somebody that sooner or later will appear as special guest star in a (true) tale that I will post here.

Yesterday I was browsing Merlin Mann’s 43folders , and I’ve stumbled upon his definition of geek:

I think Getting Things Done appeals to geeks for a lot of reasons. Overgeneralizing for effect:

• geeks are often disorganized or have a twisted skein of attention-deficit issues

• geeks love assessing, classifying, and defining the objects in their world
• geeks crave actionable items and roll their eyes at “mission statements” and lofty management patois
• geeks like things that work with technology-agnostic and lofi tools
• geeks like frameworks but tend to ignore rules
• geeks are unusually open to change (if it can be demonstrated to work better than what they’re currently using)
• geeks like fixing things on their own terms
• geeks have too many projects and lots and lots of stuff

Well, GTD does not appeal to me (even though I have already written a short note about it), but all of the above points…. man, that’s me !

Speedweek_1986.jpg
Originally uploaded by aadm.

I’ve (finally) subscribed to flickr, so now I’m a ‘pro’ user. Following the same ligthroom workflow that I’m describing in this blog, I have uploaded a few pictures taken in the last few months.

This shot is from the recent Ducati Speedweek, a racing event which was held in Hungary at the end of July.

I joined a group of friends from the Multistrada forum and raced in the class B (two-cylinder engines, 2 valves per cylinder; in other words all the bikes with the usual air-cooled desmodue engine such as Supersport 900 and 1000, Monster 1000, Monster S2R, plus anything fitted with this engine, i.e. the brand new Bimota Delirio).

Ho appena scaricato flock, il nuovo “social browser” sviluppato sulla base di Firefox/Mozilla, e sono davvero senza parole: integrazione totale tra web browsing, blogging e photoblogging !

No more Safari or Firefox ?

Sembrerebbe il destino di Flock… peccato che tutti i browser basati su Mozilla siano un po’ troppo pesanti per il mio vecchio iBook G3 (che continuo a usare per scrivere, mentre il macmini e’ diventato un mediamulo).

Questo era tanto tempo fa… adesso (agosto 2006) uso con gran piacere Camino; nonostante abbia un iMac intel e quindi potrei usare tranquillamente anche un browser piu’ pesante, preferisco avere un browser che faccia il browser e il resto lo faccio online.

Lots of sites nowadays offer digital music as .ape or .flac files; what’s wrong with mp3s ?

I should include a technical note here together with a bit of history, but since I’m not the most qualified for this sort of thing I’ll keep it short and simple: mp3 is a format that stores music in compressed format, therefore with some quality degradation (high compression=high degradation=low quality music=small file); wav/aiff is the format that is used for audio CDs, highest quality, uncompressed, large files (size ratio is 10:1 for CD-quality files versus mp3 files). So a bunch of people came up with some new formats for digital music, such as ape and flac. These are lossless compression formats – which means that they have exactly the same quality of the input CD music, but they’re half the size. So if you don’t want to trade on quality, go for ape/flac.

I’ve been stuck at home due to a minor major incident in the past 4 weeks, so I had the chance to enjoy a couple of TV series: Seinfeld (1st and 2nd season) and Huff.

Seinfeld is a wickedly funny show “about nothing” as the americans say; never heard of it here in Italy, and I suppose that it’s a kind of show that would not translate as well to the italian taste as Friends. So there’s Jerry Seinfeld (a real first class stand-up comedian), his ex-grilfriend and two other buddies, New York and a local cafe’, nice intermezzos where Seinfeld plays himself doing the stand-up comedy thing, and lots of brilliant jokes and comedy setups that you really love to watch’em again and again.
Mind you, it’s really addictive stuff: once you begin watching it you will not stop. Believe me.

This is the way:

1. get an idea: basically, whatever springs to my mind;

2. write it down: on a piece of paper, if on the move; if connected, open my gmail account, write a new mail with subject something like “[blog] how to spit like a lama”, then save as draft;

3. leave it standing for at least a couple of hours;

4. copy & paste it on the blogger edit page, do some minor cosmetic modifications, change the publishing dates to avoid embarassment (“yes boss I’ve been working for hours on this project, what do you think I’m sitting up on my ass in this office?”)

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Some time ago I stumbled upon this thing, the Getting Things Done thing, aka GTD. How do you wanna call it ? A geekish obsession ? A lifestyle idea for nerds ?

Anyway, the Hipster PDA post was pretty cool (and fun to read). I have experienced myself the pleasure of having a toy like a palm (used to have the transparent Palm IIIe, upgraded with a IIIx motherboard, then switched to a Sony Clie), only to realize it was a useless and timewasting piece of equipment, and switched back to post-it notes and my trusty old mobile (6310i) to keep the phone numbers and passwords.

I don’t watch too much tv.

My beatiful LCD widescreen TV has a quiet life with me; not too much zapping (surely a source of stress not only for the zapper -me-, but also for the zapped -the tv-). Every once in a while, when I’m stuck at home during the weekends (a rare event), I watch MotoGP or Superbike races. News, and what goes on in the world? I prefer the internet or the good old radio. Anyway I never dig too much in those subjects. It was different when I was living in the UK, I must say; BBC news was at first a great way to learn spoken english (then I realized also the true meaning of unbiased news, a luxury that we don’t have here in Italy).