New Bike, and small Thesis victories

Friday I finally got out to Seven Oaks by 7:30. Unfortunately most of the guys I knew were already done riding by the time I ran into them by 8:30. Oh well. I had a good time. The singletrack is definitely singletrack. Reminds me a lot of colorado in a couple of places. I had lots of thoughts about bike setup during the ride. Mainly the 26er vs. 29er debate. The 26" went up the super steep hills of the trails, but definitely weren't as smooth over smaller rough patches of trail. The Bontrager is definitely a touch too big I'm thinking. Around some switchbacks it is just a hair too tall to position myself right. And I'm starting to wonder if I should try eggbeaters again. My 959s got dirty and stuck a bit. My back was killin me, for unknown reasons. But in the end it was great to really push myself with a mountain bike. And all in all the Bontrager still gets me around really great. I'm really feelin the need to upgrade one last time to M950 bits here and there.

Due to the ride, and/or seeing the folks' cool Surlys, Cannondale, and Salsa, I remembered I had a bike to buy. Well, that and it was finally pay day. So I finally put in an order for the Kona. Talked to Nate at Monkey Wrench in Lincoln, and he took my credit card, and put 20% down on the last 16" Kona they had in stock(phew!!!). If I would have thought it through better, with only 20% down I should have ordered it a long time ago. Plus with the fourth, Nate thought it wouldn't get into town until July 9th. So, if that stays true, I won't go to Lincoln till the following weekend. So I'll probably go out to the Boone race this weekend, but doubt that I'll race. It'd be fun to see everybody race though.

So I also made some progress on my thesis program. It won't seem interesting to anyone reading this, but here's a screenshot:















The yellow curve is a NURBS curve. I'll eventually get it to select a region of that curve. Then I'll use some math to constrain where the region (currently bound by the 3 red points) can move. The movement would be shown by a tool that would move in the direction specified by the green lines. So you can take an artist shape (bound by the red dots) and move it without affecting its shape. The tool would take the shape of the selected region to highlight to the user that they aren't going to change that part of the curve.