A quick post to follow up on my tweet last night.
I went on a very wet, cold and rainy ride last night with Paul G and Mark N. It was awesome because even though the weather said "Stay at HOME!" none of us wanted to be the one to call off the ride. Man up and ride!
The trail up Rollercoaster was nasty. The combination of recent heavy rain and the large amounts of clay in Riverdale dirt meant my wheels turned into heavy, non-mobile, clay laden donuts. It was nasty and took some work in a puddle to clean off the mess. I also noticed that my brakes were acting "quirky" - still stopping, but rather less responsive than usual.
Fast forward through some more climbing/riding/descending (Red Trail -> No Shirt, No Service -> Mother T -> Go T -> bottom end of Downtown Boogaloo -> Boogaloo Heights -> Upper Boogaloo). I was beginning to notice a significant lack of stopping power though Go T. It took some serious weight shifting to make the corners.
It was at the top of the fun valley section of Upper Boogaloo that I noticed that I pretty much had no more front brakes, they kinda worked. Still, I was in the zone so I ripped it down.
... until the last hard left just before the trail crosses the powerline. My brakes were totally gone, no stopping power, no slowing. I was going pretty quick. I forgot the golden rule of mountain biking - if you look at the tree you will hit the tree - until the last second that I went to the right between the tree of tooth loosening and a big piece of deadfall. Teeth intact, I came to a stop - giggling - and walked out and called it a ride.
On the way home I figure the combination of *a lot* of descending over the past month plus the clay conspired to eat away my brake pads faster than expected. I thought I had at least the rest of the season left in my stoppers - I am glad I was just XC riding, if it was more steep I might have less teeth!
Moral of the story - stay off your brakes in Whitehorse clay!
Updated: there is a bug in the tool, but really it's on NWTel's side. Their https certificate is misconfigured on the usage site. To make the widget work you have to login to the usage site (using Safari) and when it warns you of the certificate error you need to say you trust the certificate they have been issued. The widget will work perfectly after this confirmation.
I just finished putting the final touches on the little dashboard widget I use to keep track of my NWTel cable data usage.
In this release I have made some very minor wording changes, simplified the configuration and improved the ability of the widget to actually pull down data from the NWTel usage site.
This is mostly unsupported software - in so much that it works for me and with my testing on my machine. Throw support requests into the comments section and I will try to be fairly responsive.
It's somewhat ironic that my widget uses an https connection and the website itself uses http; not that it matters, but a MAC address could be used for nefarious purposes...
You could just use Safari's ability to pull a piece of a webpage and create a widget for it but this is more fun and I like the way the gauge fills up as more of your data cap is used!
For the three or four people that downloaded it last time I have a new and improved (ahem) version of the NWTel cable usage cap dashboard widget in the hopper and ready for release in the next few days.
I could release it now but there is some cleanup remaining and I would hide my head in shame if ever anyone actually saw how I am mangling javascript to do my beckoning.
