even more crap from johan

This is almost certainly of no interest to you unless you own a Novara Fusion bicycle or another bike with a similar headlight to mine.

The headlight assembly (with two lights) is labeled "LP-M300" -- "Xenon" on one side and "High Brightness LED" on the other. It has two bulbs, both powered by the front hub generator: one is an LED bulb which is good for people seeing your bike. The other is a 6 volt, 2.4 watt Xenon bulb, which is very good at illuminating the path in front of your bike.

Well, it is until the bulb burns out, which happened a few months ago, after i'd been riding the bike about 5 days a week for the previous year or so. I tried the bulbs that REI had in stock, but they didn't last longer than a 15 minutes. I googled for several hours on several occasions, but the best thing i could find, the Union LT5004, (also 6v, but 4w) would NOT work -- the glass globe was too large to fit in the light housing. So don't order that. :) I sent email to REI's online customer support, and didn't get any useful help there.

After riding around in the dark for awhile, i broke down, googled contact info for Shimano, and called them directly. In about 5 minutes (guh!) i had a part number that my local REI could order for me: Y76Z17000. I had to order at least six, but i don't mind -- they were $4, which is about average for bulbs like this, and i'll probably eventually use them. The bulb package also says on it: LP-N010 Electric Bulb (6v - 2.4w) (Xenon).

Hopefully this info will eventually help someone else. :)

Ow. I still can't go all the way up this hill without stopping. It's over 100m vetical climb in about 1km distance. Doen't really sound that bad, but it's gruesome, even on my Cannondale with the triple crank.

Images from Googleearth plot of GPS data:
whole route
hairy part

Overall, a short ride: about an hour covering 22 km total.

Afterwards, i undirtified, and had a yummy dinner at Swad (vegetarian Indian, up on N. Lamar) with A & S, and a friend of theirs', and then we were off to Coraline in 3D at Galaxy, which i really enjoyed. All through the movie, i kept smelling the Indian spices on my hands, and eagerly anticipated finishing off the leftovers, which i did as soon as i got home. YUM!

...when i'm happy to be me, here in Austin.

Walked to The Parlor for dinner, and got a small no-cheese pizza with veggie sausage, broccoli, garlic, and basil (and four beers). (And topped the pizza with some of the nutrional yeast they keep behind the bar for us vegany-veggie types.)

Sat at the bar. In between S, a Chicagoan who moved to Austin last year, and met another guy, P, who'd lived in Chicago for 12 years. And we all have G1 phones, which is just one of those strange and pleasant coincidences. So we talk about Chicago and all of it's good and bad things, and a bunch of other stuff.

And then i start talking to D, the bartender/manager/so forth, and his computer has been dead for awhile, so i offer him the old Pentium 4 tower i've had in my closet for the last 6 months, and he's willing to try Linux on it. So i think i'll put Ubuntu on it and see how that works.

Awesome pizza, good beer, open source (google) phones, reminiscing about Chicago, and recycling an old computer by giving it to a good person (and making one less Windows machine in the world). I don't think it gets much better than this.