Category: Life

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Monkey Wrench Cycles Shop Review

Backstory: I bought a Specialized Hardrock bike 4 or 5 years ago and rode it quite a bit but stopped because the drivetrain was not working right. The bike had trouble shifting gears and staying in gear. The place I had bought it from in Lincoln got a chance to fix it twice and really did not do much but charge me to fix it.

Review: So deciding I wanted to bike again I pulled the bike out and found, it was likely (After some Google searches) that I needed a new freewheel because I could peddle put not put any power to the ground. After hearing good things about Monkey Wrench Cycles in downtown Lincoln I gave them a call. Monkey Wrench is a service oriented bike shop. While they will sell you a bike they specialize in repair of any problem, big or small. These guys know their stuff! They are racers and hard core bikers, not some college student who are their just to pay the bills. They were able to get my bike in and explained a possible estimate on the price from the problems I had described over the phone. So the next day I dropped it off and explained all the problems I had been having and was told it would be ready in 2 days.

Two days later I went to pick up the bike. The best part of the service was how they explained to me everything they did and why. Being a detail oriented person and mechanical I like to know why and how things work, so this was great. On my bike they put on the new freewheel, and then went to test drive the bike. The technician felt more vibration in the drivetrain and went on to further diagnose that my chain was way stretched. This was news to me as I had no idea chains stretch but after further explanation this is a very common problem. If you ride your bike for 30-40 minutes a couple times a week they recommend you change your chains every 3 to 4 months. Don’t worry they are cheap about $12. A stretched chain can cause your other drivetrain components to wear prematurely. After replacing the chain they adjusted my brakes. The design of my calipers is poor, and because of this a cap cracks, falls off which causes a critical spring to not function as designed. As a result most of the brakes only pull from one side cutting in ½ your stopping power and causing uneven wear. Since this is a design flaw the part is no longer made so the solution becomes modification of the part. The mounting bracket was taken off and drilled for a new cable run location. Now the brakes work great and pull from each side.

At the end of the day I am very impressed. These guys did quite a bit of work on my bike, they spent time doing great work and then checked their work by going out and putting a couple of miles on it. The bike is now better than it has ever been even brand new from the factory. The price was very reasonable too for the amount of work that was done.

If you live in Lincoln, Nebraska or surrounding areas I cannot recommend Monkey Wrench enough. A+ Local business! Check out their website http://www.monkeywrenchcycles.com/ blog http://monkeywrenchcycles.blogspot.com/ and Google customer reviews as well for their address and phone number.

Monkey Wrench Cycles LLC
1225 P Street, Lincoln, NE 68508-1429
(402) 477-4104

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First Thunderstorm of 2010

Last night Lincoln received its first real big thunderstorm of the year. Parts of Northeastern Lancaster County were even in a tornado warning, but in south Lincoln we got just a sprinkle of rain and some impressive lighting. I went out on the back deck and took a few photos of the impressive clouds. The storm was a bit odd because it was spinning counter clockwise so the storm came from the southeast.I really like how the panoramic turned out.

It was really cool to watch all the photos people were posting to Twitter with the #LNK hash tag. You got minute by minute updates on the conditions around town with pictures. @MrWilson has created a cool website to follow the #LNK hashtag at http://inlnk.in/. Also anyone with a twitter account who wants to stay up to date with the weather should consider following these people/companies on twitter who announce current weather as well as any watches and warnings that are issued.

@LincolnNEAlerts is a neat service provided by SWAS Sever Weather Alert System that for most cities in the USA tweets hourly the weather conditions at the official weather station (In Lincoln its the airport). They also announce when watches and warnings are posted.

@NEZ066 is a twitter account that I believe is only for Lincoln, Nebraska that only posts the most up to date watches and warnings. It is very fast and almost instant from when the National Weather Service issues the statement.

So here are the few photos I took last night

As of right now it looks like we are going to get another round tonight!

Expect more blog posts this week I have some great ideas for future topics.

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StrawberryJam, DJClay & SFS at The Bourbon in Lincoln NE Photos

Thursday February 25, 2010 some friends had asked me to come take some photos of them playing at The Bourbon Theater in Lincoln. Since I just got my new Canon 7D I went and tried out the camera. Wow am I impressed. The ability to shoot at high ISO is amazing when coming from the 20D. The auto focus is good but I need to learn abit more about it before I have it down perfect. I am really impressed with the video ability of the camera and the audio recording properties were pretty good as well.


StrawberryJam

Make sure to watch the video in 720P!

DJClay
http://www.myspace.com/djclaymusic

SFS
http://www.myspace.com/sfslincoln


Make sure to watch the video in 720P!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FrO6A-TxPk

To view all of these photos and more in high resolution follow this link to the big gallery http://liquidretro.net/photo/gallery3/TheBourbon/

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Italian Vacation Update #3

Our Italian holiday continues. On Tuesday, an Italian National holiday, as we were coming down the curvy mountain road we had a tire go flat. Luckily we had a spare donut and in no time were on the road. The journey took a little longer because we drove on slower B roads but we made it to Montepulciano, a hill town.

In Montepulciano we stumbled into an old copper craftsman. He made everything out of copper and was so charming. We bought a heavy beautiful copper frying pan and are very excited to try it out. The town is very, very hilly which made it good exercise but the climbs were worth it for the amazing views of the Tuscan countryside.

The churches, basilicas, and duomos in the country are very impressive. We have seen many treasured relics as well as burial sites of many famous Italians such as Dante, Marconi, Galileo, Michelangelo, assorted popes, and others.

Although we weren’t in Siena for long, we still saw a lot of beautiful things! We stayed in a hotel connected to a sanctuary and run by nuns. The view was amazing. We spent some time at the Piazza del Campo, where the famous Palio horse race takes place. We went to the Duomo here as well which was beautiful and unique.

In Florence, or Firenze as the locals call it, Jon climbed about 450 steps up to take photos at the top of the Duomo. It was a tough climb but worth it. In the Accademia museum we saw the famous David sculpture by Michelangelo as well as many other famous unfinished works by Michelangelo.


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Italian Vacation Update #2

For the past 3 days we have been in the Umbria region. We are staying at an Agritourismo which is a working farm. Its location is very remote. It 14km up a small mountain with 78 turns to reach the agritourismo. This has been a big change from the heat and hustle and bustle of Rome. Here we figure it takes us 5 hours to eat our meals which are eaten with everyone on the farm. Below is a photos of some of the pasta we had as one of the 3 courses for lunch one day. It has been a neat experience. However the past few days it has rained constantly. This has put a damper on some of our plans but today we went to the towns of Montefalco, Assisi, Deruta, and Spoleto. While in Assisi we had a good pizza in a small typical Italian café, see the photo below of the half eaten pizza.

Our car (pictured below) is an Alfa Romeo 159 Estate with a 1.9L turbo diesel. While we are not very impressed with the low clearance of the alfa or the stereotypical Italian electrics the engine is great and the highway driving has been fine. Without the Garmin GPS it would be near impossible.



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Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting 2009

This weekend I attended the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting in Omaha, NE. This was the largest Berkshire Hathaway meeting ever with over 35,000 people attending. This was a surprise to me because of the recession and the stock has posted its worst year ever. Despite this it was a big and busy meeting. The company movie this year was better than previous years even though it was scaled back. The company movie contains many commercials from the many companies the Berkshire owns of owns controlling stakes in. It also contained funny things about the general economic situation as well as guest appearances by celebrities. This year it was Tiger Woods with Warren Buffet as his caddie.

The format of the Q&A section after the company movie changed and was much improved. In the past all of the questions came from the audiences and many of the topics stayed away from the business of Berkshire and instead moved to other topics, it also included protesters which was quite annoying from a shareholder perspective. This year however shareholders were asked to submit questions to 3 preselected journalists who then choose the best questions to ask. This was augmented with live questions from the shareholders in attendance. This format worked much better and kept the meeting mostly on the topic of Berkshire and the general economy.

It was this Q&A section that I found the most interesting. Being a college student in the business school and being interested in Finance, and the markets I found one question more interesting than others. That question I found most interesting were the questions about the use of higher mathematics and modern portfolio theory. Both Buffet and Munger were in agreement that students and investors should stay away from theories requiring computers and calculators. The Wall Street Journal had an excellent article on this and the following quotes below are from this article http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2009/05/02/buffett-and-munger-stay-away-from-complex-math-theories/

Mr. Buffett: “There is so much that’s false and nutty in modern investing practice and modern investment banking, that if you just reduced the nonsense, that’s a goal you should reasonably hope for.”

Mr. Buffett on the efficient market hypothesis, the idea that all information is instantly priced into the market: “There’s this holy writ, the efficient market theory. How do you teach your students everything is priced properly? What do you do for the rest of the hour?”

Mr. Buffett on the use of higher-order math in finance: “The more symbols they could work into their writing the more they were revered.”

Mr. Munger on the same theme: “Some of the worst business decisions I’ve ever seen are those with future projections and discounts back. It seems like the higher mathematics with more false precision should help you but it doesn’t. They teach that in business schools because, well, they’ve got to do something. ”

Mr. Buffett adds: “If you stand up in front of a business class and say a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush, you won’t get tenure…. Higher mathematics my be dangerous and lead you down pathways that are better left untrod.”

Mr. Buffett on the persistence of bad ideas in finance: “The famous physicist Max Planck was talking about the resistance of the human mind, even the bright human mind, to new ideas…. And he said science advances one funeral at a time, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that and it’s certainly been true in finance.”

To me this is all very interesting because much of this efficient market hypothesis and how to build a portfolio is what I have been learning this semester in my finance classes. It contains a lot of math (Which I don’t like, or understand many times) the formulas are complicated and most of all many of them rely on discounting and future projections. Mr Munger’s quote here I think is right on and seems right to me. I just wish that the end of the semester was in a few weeks. I think we could have a great time discussing a lot of these ideas in my financial investment class.

It seems as though the hedge funds that have tried this “fancy math” theory have failed time and time again. One that we just learned about in class was LTCM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management) which worked good when the market was “normal” but failed hugely when the market was not normal. If history and the past few months show us anything is that the market is not normal and these practices cannot be relied upon 100%. Instead Buffets practice of buying undervalued businesses that are well run and managed.

In the end I think its interesting that the Oracle of Omaha basically thinks that a majority of what I have been learning in Business School is crap, and just time filler. The entire thing just makes me really take a step back and look at what I have “learned” this semester and wonder about graduation next year and what I will be doing after.


1935 Dusenberg SJ553 Beautiful Car

1935 Dusenberg SJ553 Amazing Car

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Husker Football Spring Game 2009 Photos

The Husker Nation sure is a dedicated crew. When you can get over 77,000 people to attend what can only be described as a glorified practice its a good day for a great game. All week the weather was forecast to be rainy for the game. Well the weather men were wrong! It rained before the game but cleared up perfectly for the game its self. The entire game was sunny and warm. You could not have asked for better weather.

I decided to bring my camera to the game because I had great seats (Thanks mom and dad). It has been a while since I had shot sports but considering I was in the sands I think I got some decent results.


More photos can be in the gallery







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Sinus CT Scan

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tfUm_zhtEQ

Yesterday I got a CT Scan of my sinuses and I asked the doctor for the images and then I made a video of it. The video is made up of 381 slices through my head. The slices start at the tip of my nose and then go through the head to the back. The results were that everything is normal and the way it is suppose to be. No infections or blockages. The reason why the left side looks large is because I was not sitting perfectly straight in the machine and was at a slight angle.