Just to let you know, I've decided to sell the under-used mountain bike to drive more funds into my ongoing road bike obsessions. It's a '97 18" Kona Kilauea with a nice Marzocchi Z2 fork, recently overhauled with new oil and nice Enduro seals, so it's better than new. I even have extra springs for the fork, and two differnent stems (short and long). The thing's a peach, a super-tough steel cross-country hardtail with XT components. I want, oh, $400 for it, or trade for all manner of nifty road bike stuff, from frames to wheels. I'll post photos shortly.

Ahh! Apologies for a gross lack of content lately. For her part, The Lovely One has been roundly chastised, and will be back on schedule shortly.

For my part, too much stuff, almost all of it blandly personal and not really informative in some external way. Enjoy a peek behind the curtain of my posts for a moment: I don't know if it's obvious, but I've used a general principle with my posts that they should be of external interest whenever possible. That means I favour commentary, recommendations, the rare tasty link, and intrinsically interesting photos. Whether I succeed is left as an exercise for the reader. I try to write somewhere between the exposed diaries of LiveJournal and the very non-personal posting of pros like Kausfiles. If I were to create some sort of target for these posts, I'd say I want to provide an interesting thing every day.

Back to the salt mines. First the impersonal. Yay Iraq. While the enemies of democracy threatened to (according to that article) "wash the streets with 'voters' blood'" (and presumably to clean the windows with their bile, and sweep the sidewalks with their intestines...say what you want, those suicidal terrorists have an ear for dialogue), Iraqis voted in numbers on par with the most recent elections in Canada and the U.S.

Now for the personal, which has been pretty frantic lately. Last night, I stayed up until 0130h doing as-yet-invisible prep work on my club's website. Due to some internal household rearrangement, TLO and I have decided it's time to get a new computer, and the last desktop machine in the house, the reliable and silent Indigo Montoya, will be retired for a cheap-and-cheerful 12" iBook. Those things are tiny! More like a hulking PDA than a small laptop. Speaking of PDAs, whatever happened to inkwell? There's an OS X technology that was either intended for a device that didn't come out, or is intended for a device that will come out, or was waiting for tablet PCs to succeed (which they have not, and probably will not: the problem is that keyboards are faster than pens). Speaking of OS X, the one thing holding me back from actually purchasing the iBook is my interest in figuring out when Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") and the next revision of iBooks will be released.

I think at some point I have to admit I'm not an edge-chaser. If I get a G4 this month and G5 iBooks are announced in two months, I'll live. Anyone want to buy an iMac?

Meanwhile, I also want to sell one or two of my bikes. Too many bikes, not enough riding to go around, and the race bike needs an upgrade. Time to fix that by getting rid of the MTB for now. Anyone want to buy a Kona Kilauea with a Marzocchi Z2 fork?

But now I'm thinking about some New Year's resolutions that are coming to the fore. One of those was to think seriously about making myself more valuable, or at least better compensated. Taking a page from my father-in-law, I intend to stay at my day job, but make my after-hours work pay better. This will help with a lot of things, for a lot of reasons. More on this and other plans later. Also in the short term, I have to rack that crab apple wine!

The job jar is plumb full: take down the rest of the Christmas lights (I'm still way ahead of last year, when the husk of the Christmas tree mocked us from the backyard around Easter; this year it became mulch about two days after Epiphany), finish a bunch of side projects, work more on the bike-club site, and fit in some training. Maybe the most important project is this: I want to do a much better job of keeping my to-do list in hand. Not sure how yet, but I finally understand why both my father and my grandfather always have a small notepad in their breast pocket. It's because no Cousineau can remember anything.

Did I mention the bike training? I feel great! Motivated, well-planned, and ready to shock the world! This year, I have a plan, I have guidance, and I know what I'm going to do. I'm putting every Cat 4 in the Lower Mainland on notice now: Don't bother peaking between June 26 and July 3, because I am going to be in perfect form then, with patient tactics, a quiet soul, a sharp mind, and a strong body. I recommend you all go to the July 2-3 Race at the Edge in the Queen Charlottes, because I will be at the PoCo Classic (the, er, inagural running...) on July 3, and I will be so strong, determined, and successful that you will feel the sour kind of pain while I revel in the sweet kind of pain!

As usual, I found some time to read Car and Driver at the newsstand this week, and the most interesting article of all was a column by Csaba Csere, one of their several smart, engineer-background editors. Kudos to them, by the way, for making the content available online.

He was on about the genuinely shocking news that electronic stability controls (ESC) in cars make a big difference in the rate of accident involvement of those cars. To sum up the most significant finding, cars that are equipped with ESC had about half the rate of "involvement" in fatal single-vehicle accidents, versus previous versions of those cars without ESC (read the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety report; I've elided some minor details). Since single-vehicle accidents are about half of all fatal accidents, this means, in theory, that universal ESC adoption could prevent about a quarter of all annual fatal crashes.

That's a big difference. And Csere has some interesting ideas about why this is so, especially since (maybe even more shockingly) anti-lock brakes don't seem to have any effect on accident or fatality rates. The column is a must-read.

Csere quotes studies from the IIHS and the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (an actual US government body). I haven't found the latter document yet, but they do have this page on their general ESC research, complete with pictures of a heavily-instrumented Corvette on a wet course.

Dave sent me this video, obviously from some years ago (since some years ago is how long ago mountain bike racers would be caught dead in these colours) of a very interesting way of handling rider infractions.

No posts lately? I haven't had a lot to say. The weather is shockingly good, and I'm loving it. It was so mild yesterday that I rode home from work in my fleece jersey and shorts. No leg warmers. That's surprising.

Since I love the program, I ought to mention this, too: Picasa 2 is out now, and it corrects the only complaint I had about the old version (you can now zoom in on an individual picture), and it adds several other simple editing fixes for pictures. I haven't tested the improved integration with Blogger yet, but that seems like a good idea! It's still free, too.

I have lots of minor, mostly boring projects around (plus The Lovely One's car purchase project, which should be interesting). I'll tell you about some of those when they're done. But I did do some baking last night, making up a batch of peanut butter cookies from a slightly surprising recipe. There are three ingredients: 1 cup of peanut butter, 1 egg, and 3/4 cup of sugar (the recipe suggests one cup of sugar, but I'm happy with less, and this with unsweetened peanut butter). So simple, even I can make them.

TLO's assessment was right: needs more chocolate. They're okay as they are, but chocolate chips really make them nice. My mother-in-law also points out that these cookies cannot be taken off the tray until they are cool, or they will deform.

So there you go. An amusing video, a comment about the weather, a link to a computer program, and a cookie recipe. One-stop shopping.