Simon Rumble’s blog

Letter I just sent to Giant Bicycles, who make excellent bikes, apart from this one. Anyone wanna buy a bike that could easily be converted into an excellent single-speed or fixie?

In April 2007 I bought the Giant CRX City Pro from Wooly's Wheels in Sydney. I was quite excited about it. I'd been looking at hub gear bikes for years, enchanted by the elegance of the design. I now realise it was a big mistake and there are good reasons for derailleurs continuing to be popular.

Everything apart from the hub gear on the CRX is excellent. The frame is agressive, really wanting to zip along. It's a brilliant commuting bike, with fast wheels and tyres, ready to go.

Unfortunately, the moment you get a flat tyre you realise how bad the hub gear is. Getting the wheel off requires a spanner and getting your hands covered in grease. Getting it back on requires that you understand exactly how it all fits together, and get the tension on the chain just right or you'll have big problems. I ended up having to constantly take the bike back to the shop to get the rear wheel back on properly.

Next up one of the anti-rotation washers on the hub gear broke, causing the hub gear to rotate when it shouldn't. This was less than a year old, with the bike doing much less than 50km a week.

Then the hub gear completely crapped itself. All the internals seized up. The shop sent it back to Shimano who recommended it be serviced every three months. This is a bike that is pitched as a low-maintenance commuter machine!

Now, a few months but less than 100km later (it's been Winter and I've had some injuries) the hub gear has crapped itself again. Previous times I thought it might have been the way I put the components back together after repairing a flat. This time I haven't had a flat, so it's managed to destroy itself on its own!

In conclusion, the Nexus hub isn't ready. The mechanism of its attachment is vastly overcomplicated, and it isn't durable enough for light use, let alone heavy use. Selling this bike as a commuter machine is a terrible mistake.

The thing about it is I like your bikes. I own a Giant mountain bike that is a spectacular achievment in quality for a reasonable price. I've recommended the non-Nexus CRX to friends looking for commuter bikes, and they're really happy with them. The rest of the CRX is brilliant! I'm tempted to sell the CRX City Pro and buy an ordinary derailleur CRX.

I recommend you stop selling the CRX Nexus variant. It's only going to give your company a bad name and turn people off cycling.

Very disappointed with this bike.

Holly and I saw The Grates last night. What an amazing live band! Full of energy and brilliant renditions of their infectious pop tunes.

The support band, The John Steel Singers were fun too. It's clear they share the ability to craft fun pop tunes with The Grates. The other support band, The Vasco Era, were lousy. Clearly they idolise dodgy, talentless junkie Pete Doherty and his overrated Libertines.

It seems Internet Explorer is quite strict about having multiple IDs in a document with the same selector. This, combined with the way I read the Prototype documentation, had me walking around in circles for ages completely unable to identify the bug. How annoying!

So I've documented it here, with a test to demonstrate it. I'll submit a ticket for the Prototype document shortly, as it does give the impression this will work.

Jamie Wilson recently posted this LOLCeleb to a list I'm on. Brilliant!

Update: Apparently some backwards people don't get the reference. See Wikipedia iz in ur brain, knowing your stuffs!!1!!.

So now that the free market absolutists have become interventionist socialists, are they moving from the economic equivalent of survival of the fittest to some kind of intelligent design theory?

On that note, Colbert gets Business Syphilis. Hilarious!

A while back I blogged about fridge efficiency and my idea for improving it by creating airflow over the condensors. Lance at the ATA didn't seem to think it would be effective without forced air, though since publication I've received some emails saying it will improve efficiency up to 30%, without complicated active ventilation.

As part of the Food for the Future Fair last Saturday, we took the tour of Michael Mobbs' Sustainable House. We've been there before. The biggest mistake he mentions is his fridge selection and lack of passive ventilation incorporated into the design. With a fairly small gap under the flooring, the layout of the joists meant that when he retrofitted a grill in, there wasn't much airflow.

We don't have the low floor problem, so I think I'll ensure this is in our design. We'll probably also chuck our massively-inefficient fridge and buy a better one, though I'm kinda hooked on the ice maker now.

Mobbs suggested the best approach was to have a cupboard with the fridge door attached to the door, with a grill 25% larger than the fridge on the floor and some way of venting at the top of the cupboard. That way you'll get year-round ventilation without losing room heat in Winter. I like that idea a lot!

I'm about to cut the agency out of the equation with my long-term contract (2 years so far) and reduce the amount they're taking from my wages. I don't want to avoid tax, don't particularly want (or really have) deductions and don't have any other significant income sources, so the company formation route isn't a good idea. I just want someone to do my payroll, insurance and super.

So can anyone recommend such an agency in Australia?

I really enjoy Grab Your Fork but gee, going out for dinner with her must be a bit annoying. Those gorgeous photos of the food don't take themselves! In this post she records a Yum Cha with a bunch of other food nerds. And look at all the lenses!

Much as I appreciate her excellent blogging, and the spectacular photos, it'd be kinda off-putting dining with someone snapping every dish.

In other food news, we went to the Food for the Future Fair on Saturday in Chippendale. It was quite small, but really lovely. Beautiful warm weather and a very relaxed atmosphere. I've always loved the area, and miss living on Rose Street. Now the community has planted loads of edible plants in the streets, and are doing a community composting project.

The fair could have used a few more stalls, but it was pretty cool nevertheless. I would have bought more vegetables if our garden hadn't suddenly jumped into productive mode and we hadn't got our fruit and veg box that morning.

Saturday night we had a few people we'd run into at the fair around for an impromtu spring feast from the garden. I made a couple of bruschetta from garden ingredients. One was blanched baby broad beans with mint and slivers of parmesan. The other was blanched black Tuscan kale (cavolo nero) with sage and feta. Yummy!

I'm looking forward to more from the garden. We also had the first brocolli last week. We've been eating delicious rocket for a month or two now. Next up should be radish, snow peas, lettuces and more broad beans and brocolli.

I've wanted to see the Tank Stream, Sydney's first water source, for a long time. While it provided clean water to the original white settlers, it quickly became polluted and these days is little more than a sewer. It was replaced by Busby's Bore in 1830 following Sydney's first major engineering project cost and time blowout, a tradition followed today by all major engineering projects in the state.

Anyway, in February this year I found a form on the Historic Houses Trust site that claimed I would be notified when the next ballot for tours of the Tank Stream were being announced. Except they didn't tell me that there's there'll be tours next month as part of the Sydney Open 08 thing, which sees a bunch of properties open for tours.

Fortunately I spotted it and put today into my calendar. I now have tickets to do the tour on 2nd November. If you want to see the Tank Stream, get in now. We're doing the 15:45 tour.

Apparently guerilla gardening has come to Marrickville, with people taking over the grass verges in their streets. There's no grass verge on our street but I've noticed a few people have planted ornamentals around the trees. In our old street there was sage and rosemary around some of the trees.

I'd actually been thinking recently about planting nasturtiums around the tree out the front of our place, because it's a very hardy, attractive plant and both the leaves and flowers make a good addition to salads. I'm also intrigued by the recipe for nasturtium seed "capers" that I found in the River Cottage Preserves book.

Now if the nasturtium seeds I've had sown for a couple of weeks would just sprout already!