Living La Vida Lunda: A blog abroad

The Minnesota No(ICE)s

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  • Bike Build, Day 2

    Some more parts arrived today. Wheels, brakes, and some sundrys. I installed the cassette on the rear wheel, and installed the rear brake rotor and caliper. Cables have to wait for a fork … It’s starting to look bicycle-ish. Oooohhhh! Shiny. I also installed the front rotor. I got the “big” rotor for the front.…

  • Bike Build, Day 1

    The frame arrived today. I gleefully unpacked it and took some pictures. Not much to do until the other parts arrive later this week, but you can see that I installed the BB, cranks, and derailer. And, yes, a brushed titanium finish is simply stunning.       Bikes

  • 1.1.11

    Well, here it is, a new year. Here’s hoping it rocks for you all! As a winter project, I tend to completely strip down my bike and clean/tune it for the upcoming season. This year, I’m taking the realization that the frame is too small, and I’m building up a new bike around a Habanero…

  • Holiday Toys

    As I’ve commented before, I tried experimenting with a Linux/Windows laptop, and it wasn’t terribly successful. I realized that I don’t need a lot of power and was really looking at the netbook segment. I was also trying to see if I could make an iPad really work for my main device (assuming that I’m…

  • Kick-ass Pie Crust

    I made an apple pie. I peeled apples, sugared them, and made a rustic crust. I used Alice Waters’ recipe, which is brilliantly simple – flour, butter, water. But here’s the key – it has to be cold butter, cut up and cut into the flour. Cold butter yields a supa-dope flaky crust that you…

  • MSP Snow Madness

    We had a really nice fall, and I was able to ride all the way to November 19th. When we came back from the Thanksgiving holiday, it was in the teens, and snowy. Two weeks ago, it just dumped snow – 20″ in a day and a half. It started on a Friday evening, and…

  • Madsen. In da HOUSE!

    I bike to work much of the year. This year, my season ran from March 15th to November 19th. When I moved to Mpls, I sold my car and we went to a single car house. That was pretty cool. But, there’s still a number of trips that we do with a car that are…

  • Second Only To Sex

    There are many things I love about my wife. But, up there on the list is the fact that my two favorite cookies are the ones she makes. A plate of cookies like this is awfully hard to beat.

  • A Grand Experiment

    A while back, I was experimenting with Ubuntu (10.04) in a VM (Parallels on the Mac), and thought it was pretty darn good. So, I decided to try an experiment and see if I could use Linux exclusively (instead of my Mac). So, I bought a Lenovo ThinkPad x201 – a well documented and linux-friendly…

  • More on the Vargo Wood Stove

    A little while back, I referred to the Vargo Titanium Wood Stove. To wit, I’d bought one. Well, this weekend, I gave it a test drive in the backyard. The pictures look a lot like all the other ones on the web. Setup: Fuel – I used a modest pile of collected sticks from my…