I realized that I've written here about my Santa Cruz MTB and my Orbea Road Bike, but that I never wrote about my commuter bike because I purchased it during the period when I stopped writing to this blog. Today I'll fix that omission!

In late summer 2020 I purchased a Priority Continuum Onyx to replace my Frankencommuter bike. My old commuter was a hodgepodge of parts: a Nashbar road bike frame (called the "Framé" and no longer available for purchase), along with various used bike parts I acquired over the years; mostly from when I upgraded parts on my bikes. It was fine for what it was but after using it for about ten years it was wearing out and I was ready for something nicer. There were aspects of the bike that could never be fixed. In particular, the inability to fit fenders to the frame led me to decide something else was needed.

After doing research I decided I wanted a belt drive bicycle. I was interested in belt drive bikes because all the positives (listed here) seem perfect for a commuter and the negatives unimportant, or at least less important than the positives. They are low-maintenance, long-lasting, and clean. There are negatives (listed here; more later), but even some of the negatives have positives. For example, it's impossible to shift gears on a belt drive using a standard derailleur. To have more than one gear requires an internal gearing system, often placed in the rear wheel hub. This makes the bike more complicated, heavier, and less efficient. However, because the gearing is internal, it's sealed away from rain and dirt and requires less maintenance, exactly what I want from a commuter bike.

Priority bicycles sells only belt drive models, and I settled on the Continuum Onyx. It had basically everything I wanted:

• Belt drive
• Continuously variable transmission (CVT) internal rear hub (more on this later)
• Fenders
• Built-in lights using a front-hub dynamo
• Hydraulic disc brakes
• Reflectors everywhere, including the tire sidewalls
• Upright seating with flat bars
• Forgiving 32C tires
• "Acoustic" a.k.a. non-electric. At home I have to carry my bikes up and down a flight of stairs and I didn't want a bike that weighed 50-60 pounds

About the only thing they omitted, and probably should include on a city commuter bike, is a bell. Like reflectors, bells are legally required in many jurisdictions (but never enforced, really). I have added a bell and it's useful.

The are definitely negatives to a belt-driven bicycle. The bike is fairly heavy, especially in the back (although I'm probably spoiled by my other quite light bikes). It's also clearly less efficient than a standard chain-driven bicycle. I am not as fast as I think I would be on a similar non-belt driven bicycle at a given level of effort. Many parts of the bike would be hard to fix on the go. However I only ride it in town, and worst case I'll leave it locked up somewhere and use my bus pass to get where I'm going and return for it later. Doing any kind of maintenance that requires removing the rear wheel is a decent hassle.

The CVT rear hub has its plusses and minuses. On the positive side, in contrast to a traditional derailleur, it doesn't require any fine adjustment. It uses a single grip shifter(*), meaning that the bike can reasonably be operated with one hand that can both shift and brake (e.g. you're carrying a pie in your other hand). Coming from typical bikes with set gear ratios the CVT is at first very weird, but being able to change the ratio by just a smidge is useful. The minuses come down to the same issues mentioned above: weight, efficiency, and difficulty of working with the rear wheel. In my opinion the plusses outweigh the minuses.

After four and half years of ownership, it has indeed been a very low-maintenance bicycle. Other than pumping up the tires once or twice a month:

• I recently replaced the brake pads (front and back) and bled the hydraulic brakes. I've done this before on my mountain bike, and once I figured out how to shimmy the bleed block into the brakes, it was actually easier than the Santa Cruz
• I can't remember the last flat tire, and I think I've had less than 5 flats overall
• The new (see below) kickstand spring mechanism gets gummed up with road grime and about twice a year needs to be cleaned out

I do have some minor to medium complaints about the bike that mostly consist of the items Priority saved a few bucks on:

• The factory-spec kickstand was flimsy and I had to replace it when it broke. I replaced it with a two leg kickstand (holy moley, how can someone write hundreds of words about a kickstand?) that is far stronger and better than the original one. The one I purchased is especially nice and I spent more than I could have, but the one Priority supplied was not very well made
• I'm on the third bottom bracket. For both previous the bearings holding the spindle went bad and the bottom bracket developed a very annoying click. It is likely that a higher quality bottom bracket would solve this issue
• The connector that links the dynamo hub to the wire that runs to the lights is cheap and needlessly difficult to reattach after removing the front wheel. It's probable that this connector is matched to the hub, and the dynamo hub is not manufactured by Priority, but it's annoying
• The provided pedals were plastic which I replaced with some metal ones I already had. Looking at flat pedals online, the cheapest metal pedals are only a few bucks more than the least expensive plastic ones. Surely this price difference is smaller when buying in bulk
• I have replaced the saddle. Saddles are a very personal choice and it's impossible for one saddle to work for everyone. No fault to Priority here

Overall I have been and am very satisfied with the bike. It has delivered on almost all of the promises of a belt-driven bicycle. If Priority & the dynamo manufacturer made the choice to spend a few more bucks (and really, just a few bucks!) in a few places, my complaints would be basically zero.

(*) I generally dislike grip shifters, but considering how the CVT works, I think this is an exception, and it's a good solution.

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It's been two weeks since my last album review because there were no un-reviewed albums in the top 10 last week. This week Big Ones by Aerosmith hit #8 on the charts. Big Ones is compilation/greatest hits album covering their prior three studio albums.

I remember when this album came out; a friend had a copy and I borrowed it for a short time. Aerosmith was experiencing a resurgence of popularity and the songs on this album seemed really cool. I didn't have MTV at home, but I was aware that their music videos featured attractive young women, something I was, ahem, interested in. Hilariously, the video for Amazing reminds me of Celery Man.

Ultimately, I can't say I've been the biggest Aerosmith fan. I don't dislike them, but they're not often the thing I go to. Looking through their music library I think I should spend some time (re)visiting it. There are albums I know I like, e.g. Toys in the Attic, so there are probably more. I would therefore say that this edition of 30 Years On is a win. It reminded me of an album I enjoyed, and to also explore the Aerosmith library more fully than I have done. It's too early for me to suggest Big Ones over the three albums the songs are drawn from, but it's not a bad compilation album and it's likely you'd enjoy it.

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I don't subscribe to Spotify, so I don't get an end-of-year Spotify Wrapped summary. But not to be outdone, Last.fm offers a "Playback" report. It's basically the same thing as Wrapped except that Last.fm waits until the year is actually over before sending out the report.

I managed to scrobble a few more tracks than last year:

My Playback report isn't all that interesting so it's not worth sharing. What I do want to highlight from it is the need for people to learn when to use averages, and when to use medians. Here is one of the factoids my report tells me, that my top track was Right Back to It by Waxahatchee with MJ Lenderman. My 17 listens puts me in the top 5% of listeners of that song.

Next, the reports gives me this graph which shows the cumulative number of listens to the track by me and by the average of all users who also listened at least once. Despite being in the top 5% of all listeners, you'll notice that my line is below the average line. These two facts combine to illustrate why averages are often misleading, and medians are more informative.

Let's put it this way, if I was serving food with Warren Buffet at a shelter for 100 homeless people, on average we would all be billionaires. Then asking the question "on average you're all billionaires, why are most of you homeless?" abuses statistics. The median wealth in that shelter would be zero, which is far more accurate of the financial condition of most of the people there.

In the same way as a few people can be immensely wealthy and skew averages into meaninglessness, all it takes is a few people who put Right Back to It on repeat to heavily skew the plot into absurdity. It's likely that the median line for this track might be nearly flat at just a few plays. Maybe the people at Last.fm think that looks funny, but if I'm in the top 5% of listeners, my listening history should look very different from the median (most other) listeners!

Here's the end of year report I'm sending to Last.fm:

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2024 was a pretty good year for me in terms of cycling. Late in the year I purchased a new road bike which is only the third road bike I've ever owned (I bought my first racing road bike in 2001, a Trek 5200 in black with Rolf Wheels). But most of all I managed to increase the hours of cycling from 2023 by over 50%. For me, the enjoyment of cycling is proportional to the time I get to do it, so this increase has been great.

2024 was my twentieth year using a GPS to track my rides. In April 2005 I started with a Garmin Forerunner 301. Garmin had been making GPS receivers for years and this was an early athletics-focused device. Compared to modern devices it was imprecise and buggy (especially the heart rate monitor), but it was still very cool. I was a pioneer of "out front" bike mounts when I jury rigged the 301 to my handlebars. Not long after moving to Colorado in 2010 I upgraded to a Garmin Edge 705 that was bike-specific and had a host of upgrades, including maps, a cadence sensor, a color screen, and a barometric altimeter. A couple years ago I upgraded again to a Garmin Edge 530 which is even more accurate with the addition of GLONASS and Galileo compatibility.

I started using GPS in 2005 a full four years before Strava existed. A few years ago I took the time to upload my full history to Strava including activities that predate Strava. It's kind of fun looking at these old rides, I have historical KOMs all over San Diego. They have long been claimed by other riders, but because I was the only one using GPS back then I was the fastest!

Below I've compiled some statistics in bar chart form covering all my rides with GPS data since 2005. There are a few very clear trends:

• Through 2010 the activity trend is downwards as I sacrificed riding time in the interest of finishing my PhD (2005 is lower simply because I didn't get the Garmin until April)
• My peak year is 2011, my first full year after finishing my PhD and my second to last full childless year
• Totals continue to trend downwards with another child in 2016, and then only start to rebound in 2019 and ongoing as the children get older and require less attention
• 2018 was super rough; only 28 hours of recreational riding over the whole year

The bottom two graphs, the average speed (KPH) and rate of climbing (Meters/Kilometer), show some interesting things:

• All the years with better than 24KPH average speeds are years I think I preferred road cycling over mountain biking. For example, in 2019 I got a new mtb and I wanted to ride that all the time. Mountain biking is way slower than road biking and 2019 has the lowest average speed
• Correlated, I think all the years with more than 12 meters / kilometer of climbing are years I preferred mountain biking. Again, 2019 is an outlier because I did proportionally more mountain biking
• Years before 2010 are mostly in San Diego. It's hard to disentangle the fast speeds 2005-2007 between being younger, still racing, doing less elevation, and less mountain biking. San Diego is not flat, but it's harder to get the kind of elevation changes available along the Colorado front range

I have not included the distance I commute by bike in these plots because I can't be bothered to turn on GPS tracking when I commute. It's likely that each of the last few years, perhaps since 2019, I've commuted 500-1,000 KM by bike each year.

The plots below are interactive thanks to Plotly, a tool I highly recommend!

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Today we visited the Denver Zoo for the annual Zoo Lights event. Every year the zoo sets up hundreds of light features all across the zoo. Most lights are static, but there are some animated light features. It's a fun way to spend a cold evening doing something different at the zoo. Here are a few photos!

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The top-selling un-reviewed album this week is not Live at the BBC by The Beatles, it's The Hits by Garth Brooks. The reason I am not reviewing Garth Brooks is that he has chosen to prevent his entire catalog from being on any music streaming service except Amazon Music, and I don't have access to Amazon Music.

According to that article linked above, his stance seems mostly reasonable: most/all streaming services probably underpay artists for the music they serve to customers. The whole world of music for $15-20 a month is an incredible deal and as a consumer it's amazing. What's not reasonable is his choice of Amazon. Amazon is a notoriously bad company to work for as an employee (every word is a link to a different article about unsavory Amazon business practices). The article says that Brooks chose Amazon because they're also a retailer. I guess that as long as a consumer can choose to buy a physical album from a retailer it's okay if the same retailer streams his music? But that physical album would be shipped by underpaid, overworked, and exploited employees largely for the benefit of one of the richest people on earth. Are underpaid warehouse and delivery drivers better than underpaid artists? Brooks' choice of Amazon seems to ignore all the bad things about Amazon and suggests that it really is only about money: the money Amazon gives to Brooks.

My household used to pay for Amazon Prime, but we cancelled it and don't miss it. I admit to occasionally still buying things from Amazon, but only when I absolutely cannot find it anywhere else. I try to buy things online from specific retailers: bicycle stuff from bicycle retailers, electronics from electronics retailers, etc. I do see my own hypocrisy: I listen to music at very low cost (that pays low royalties) but also am trying to not support very low cost shopping (that pays low wages). I think the bottom line is I have basically zero market power; my choices are imperceptible to these affected groups. I don't matter. However, a big star like Garth Brooks has power, and he's chosen to use his power in what appears to be a mostly self-serving way with morals at least as flexible as mine.

I could pirate the album, but I don't care enough about Garth Brooks to do that. It's not available at my local library, either. Instead I'll drop down to #7 and listen to some Beatles, an outcome I don't dislike.

This album is mostly covers performed by the Beatles for various BBC radio programs. On the one hand, I generally disfavor covers unless they do something the original didn't. In this case, what's been added is that these covers are performed by the freakin' Beatles. The Beatles got their start (including going back to The Quarrymen days) playing covers in clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg, Germany. By the time of these BBC recordings they were surely more polished than those early days, but I'd like to think that these songs have some of the quality and energy of the Beatles before they got world famous.

You should definitely check out this album. The only asterisk is that it's over two hours long with 56 songs and a few spoken tracks. Perhaps take smaller bites of the album with breaks so you may listen without becoming overwhelmed.

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After two weeks of Christmas music, the decidedly non-holiday Vitalogy by Pearl Jam hit #1 after three weeks on the chart.

I listen to Pearl Jam relatively frequently, but not that often to Vitalogy. It has a few good songs, like Better Man and Corduroy, but overall it's nowhere near as good as Ten. Of course, that's not exactly fair because Ten is one of the best rock albums ever, and one of a few that defined grunge rock.

Overall, I'd recommend checking it out, but if you don't like it as much as Ten, that's fine.

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Following last week's Christmas album, this week we get the album with songs everyone hears (perhaps too much of) this time of year, Merry Christmas by Mariah Carey. Hitting #3 thirty years ago, this album has sold over 18 million copies since then. To mark the importance of 30 years, Mariah Carey released a 30th Anniversary Edition which I've linked to above.

My feelings about this album largely mirror how I feel about the Kenny G album last week. At the right time and in the right way, I'm completely fine with Christmas music. Christmas music can help to set a mood and that's great. I would never pick this nor any other Christmas music to actively listen to, but in the background, it can be just the right thing.

I have no doubt that this album will continue to get plays for decades to come. The songs on this album have a permanent place on many Christmas song playlists. Between Thanksgiving and New Years, you have my permission to play it, but not necessarily listen to it.

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Released in late November 1994, Miracles: The Holiday Album by Kenny G hit #1 as the post-Thanksgiving holiday season set in. Other than for this album, I do not purposely listen to Kenny G. According to last.fm, I listened to a Kenny G track 12 times before I listened to this album for this blog post. I'm fairly certain that those earlier plays were part of some algorithmic mix.

Luckily for Kenny G, the album buying public does not like the same things I like and he has been very successful. This album alone has sold millions of copies. Likely because this one was so successful, Kenny G has recorded three more holiday albums since this one.

As far as this album goes, I don't really have a problem with it when it's played at the right time (after Thanksgiving and before New Years), and for the right reasons (as background music). If you were to listen to this album any other time of the year, or listen to it actively, you're crazy. It's holiday mood music, and that's fine, and that's all it will ever be. Include these songs in a holiday mix and hit shuffle/play. That's as much mental energy you should give this album (which is fine!).

Please note that I'm not a grinch! I'm getting into the holiday mood! I recently purchased a copy of Festivitas and it now decorates my dock. And it will continue to decorate my dock until no later than New Years, at which point it will be turned off.

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Last night we attended the Boulder Parade of Lights. A loop of streets surrounding the downtown Pearl Street Mall are closed and a wide selection of groups and members of the community participate in the parade. This year my older daughter participated as a member of the Girl Scouts and she found it very fun.

Here are a few photos from the event. As always, Mr. and Mrs. Santa Claus made a visit to finish the parade.

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Hitting #4 on debut (which is as high as it will rise), Tical by Method Man is a bit of mid-90s hip hop that I never really paid attention to. Method Man is a member of Wu-Tang Clan which has been very influential for the last 30 years. I never really paid attention to Wu-Tang clan, either.

Before listening to this album, I had eight plays of Method Man on last.fm. It's up to 17 plays now, and I think it will stay there unless he gets thrown into some auto-generated mix I listen to. I like some hip hop, but even thirty years later, Method Man doesn't do much for me.

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Sometime in 1994 me and my father went to a small computer show in the UC Berkeley Student Union building (which appears to now be named The MLK Jr. Building). It was probably a Macintosh oriented event, and among the various tables there was a Power Macintosh 6100 on display. The first Macintosh computers used Motorola 68000 series chips, and in 1994 Apple was making a transition to PowerPC chips. The 6100 was the first Mac to use a PowerPC chip, and seeing one in person was exciting. PowerPC chips promised a leap in performance, and I wanted one very badly. I had to wait at least a year to enter the PowerPC world when my father bought a PowerMac 8500.

Some time ago a Mac enthusiast released a website, Infinte Mac, that allows you to run old Mac operating systems in your browser. It starts with System 1.0, and has many releases all the way up to MacOS 9, the last version of the original Macintosh OS before they made the switch to the Unix-based OS that's still in use today. I suggest you try it out, it's really fun! I like playing with the various options because it reminds me of using and playing with computers from my childhood. The machines include quite a bit of pre-installed software. Many of the games I played actually work, which is impressive. It also shows how interfaces have evolved and mostly improved over the last 30-40 years.

The website uses various software emulators (including Basilisk II and SheepShaver) to simulate specific CPUs. To rephrase, what's happening is that the classic Macintosh system is running inside of a bit of software that, on the fly, translates old CPU instructions so that they run on a different CPU type. This is naturally less efficient than running instructions directly on a real CPU.

Recently I tried running a benchmark program (Macbench) in the emulator. Below is what I got on my M1 Max MacBook Pro. As you can see, the processor score is nearly five times faster than the PowerMac 6100 I wanted so long ago. Considering that my laptop has ten cores, my laptop is roughly 50 times faster than the PowerMac 6100 while running in emulated mode. It's been 30 years and of course progress progresses, but I still find it super impressive how much faster my laptop is using software emulation. Sitting here on my lap is a machine that's orders of magnitude better than what my 14 year old self wanted so badly. Huzzah!

Earlier this month I bought a Mac Mini M4 to replace our six year old Mac Mini i3. As you can see, the M4 is over seven times faster than the PowerMac 6100. Being three generations newer than my laptop, it naturally gets a better score.

As an aside, I think that the floating point functions must be emulated in a less efficient way than the main processor functions. I don't think that the relatively low floating point scores are representative of the actual M1/M4 CPU performance.

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For the third time in four weeks, an album debuts at #1. Hell Freezes Over by the Eagles marked their return to recording and performing together after a fourteen-year break up/hiatus. The album is in two parts. The first four songs are new material recorded in a studio. The remaining eleven songs are all live versions of older songs. This is the second Eagles album I've reviewed; I did Eagles Live almost 14 years ago.

Unlike The Dude, I do not hate the f-in Eagles, man (*). According to last.fm, I have listened to the Eagles over 1800 times. I haven't listened to Hell Freezes Over very much, around 40 times as of this writing. I think that's because there's only four new songs and the rest are live versions, and in general I prefer studio versions of songs. The new songs are pretty good, both Get Over It and Love Will Keep Us Alive charted well on the radio. The live versions are interesting, with different instrumentation and arrangements than the studio versions.

Overall my recommendation is to listen to the Eagles, and listen often. Hell Freezes Over isn't bad, and perhaps worth a listen, but their other albums are much better.

(*) I made a Big Lebowski reference in my previous Eagles review, too!

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Today I visited the Shelby American Collection museum. It's in the Gunbarrel part of Boulder. I've seen signs for the museum for years but I never thought much about it until today when I decided to check it out. Honestly, I'm pretty happy I did! The museum contains a fantastic selection of cars created by and in honor of Caroll Shelby, who won the 24 Hours of Le Mans both as a driver and as a designer/constructor.

Caroll Shelby is a renown figure in American car racing history. The 2019 film Ford v Ferrari chronicles his efforts with Ford to build a car to win Le Mans and beat the Ferrari team after Enzo Ferrari played Henry Ford for a fool. Top Gear raced a Shelby GT500 against public transport and discussed some of Shelby's exploits during the film. The Grand Tour made a short film about the competition between Ford and Ferrari . There are many books about Caroll Shelby available to read.

Pretty much any car that was important in Shelby's history is in this museum. The red car above was his first Cobra race car. It's posed on the actual trailer used to take it to races, and the trailer is hitched to the actual car he used to pull the trailer and car. Info sheet for this car.

The white car above with blue stripes (a hallmark of Shelby Mustangs) is worth more than $4 million because it was driven by Ken Miles to the first victory of a Shelby Mustang. This is probably the most valuable car I've seen in person, and it's just sitting in a office park in Boulder.

The collection also includes a number of Ford GT cars, including several GT40 models. The yellow one above was driven to a win at the 1967 12 Hours of Sebring by Bruce McLaren (who founded the eponymous F1 Team ) and Mario Andretti (who is the most recent American to win the F1 driver's championship, in 1978). Info sheet for this car.

The cars above are two of the three GT40s that finished 1-2-3 in the 1966 24 Hours of Le Mans, the first win for a GT40 at Le Mans after two years of spectacular failures at the race. Famously, the #1 car (on the right) was leading the race towards the end, but Miles was ordered to ease up to allow the #2 GT40 to catch up so there could be a photo of the three GT40s crossing the finish line. Due to Miles being upset about this and easing up even more at the finish line, and the #2 car having traveled a slightly longer distance because it started behind the #1 car, the win was given to the #2 car. The #5 car (on the left) came in third, twelve laps behind. Here is the famous photograph of the three GT40s finishing together. This drama features prominently in Ford v Ferrari.

If you're ever in the Boulder area I recommend taking the time to visit this museum. Shelby had no connection to Colorado nor Boulder, but apparently the group of enthusiasts who had the energy and opportunity to make this collection reside(d) here, and the best collection of Shelby artifacts is here. Below are the rest of the photos I took there.

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Recorded 31 years ago (to the day), MTV Unplugged in New York by Nirvana hit #1 on its first week on the charts. This was the first Nirvana album released after Kurt Cobain's death in April, 1994.

According to last.fm I have listened to this album over 160 times, so I know it quite well. In one sense, since I know this album so well, and have heard it for 30 years, listening to it now gives me no surprises. In another sense, this is the kind of album I truly look forward to during this project, the albums that bring me back to being a teenager. Obviously when I listen to albums from 30 years ago that are mostly new, it's more interesting, but a good fraction of the more interesting albums I don't like, and they're more work for me.

Nirvana is one of the most important bands of the last 35 years. If you haven't already heard Unplugged, I'm surprised, and you should go about fixing that right away. Listen on headphones or in a quiet room so you can pick up Cobain's mutterings between songs. Too many albums I review belong in the dustheap of history, Unplugged is the exact opposite, and will remain relevant for decades to come.

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